Definition
Nominis is a Latin genitive form meaning "of the name" or "of a name." In legal usage it does not stand alone as a term of art but appears as a component of Latin legal phrases — most significantly *de identitate nominis* ("concerning the identity of the name") — where it anchors doctrines and procedural rules relating to the identification of persons by name in legal proceedings. The phrase signals that a question has arisen as to whether two different names refer to the same person, or whether a named party in a document or pleading is correctly identified.
Because nominis functions grammatically rather than substantively, its legal significance is almost entirely derivative: it appears in compound phrases rather than as a freestanding doctrine.
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Common Confusion
Researchers encountering *nominis* in historical sources may mistake it for an independent term of art. It is not. Its legal content lives in the phrases it completes. The most important of these — *de identitate nominis* — is the appropriate lookup term for the substantive doctrine. Rapalje & Lawrence confirm this by directing readers there immediately.
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Why It Matters in Research
The practical research risk with *nominis* is that historical pleadings, writs, and treatises deploy it inside longer Latin phrases without translation, and a researcher unfamiliar with the genitive construction may parse the phrase incorrectly or fail to locate the governing doctrine. When you encounter *nominis* in a primary source, the analytical question is always: what is the full phrase? Once identified, the phrase — not the word *nominis* alone — is the unit of legal meaning to pursue.
In pleading records from the English common law tradition through the colonial American period, identity-of-name issues arose regularly in cases where a defendant challenged whether a writ or indictment correctly named them, or where two instruments appeared to name the same person differently. The word *nominis* in such records signals that one of these identity disputes is at stake.
Corpus researchers should note that Latin legal phrases declined sharply in American legal writing after the mid-nineteenth century. Searches in post-1850 American sources are unlikely to return *nominis* constructions in live legal arguments; they will appear instead in treatises and law dictionaries synthesizing earlier doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not define *nominis* independently. Their entry consists entirely of a cross-reference: "See DE IDENTITATE NOMINIS." This is itself informative — it confirms that nineteenth-century practitioners understood *nominis* as a component term requiring redirection rather than a standalone entry. The same volume's note on *idoneus homo* ("a proper man" — one with honesty, knowledge, and ability) appears in proximity in the original source but is a separate entry and should not be conflated with the nominis doctrine.
No other shelf sources in the Law Mind corpus provide a dedicated entry for *nominis*, which is consistent with its grammatical rather than doctrinal status.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See DE IDENTITATE NOMINIS for the substantive doctrine governing identity-of-name questions in pleading and practice.
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