Definition
Archaic spelling variant of NUISANCE. "Nusance" appears in early English legal records and Law French texts as the older orthographic form of the term now standardized as nuisance. It carries identical legal meaning: an interference with the use and enjoyment of property, or an unlawful act or omission causing harm, inconvenience, or damage to others.
The term itself has no independent substantive legal content distinct from nuisance. Researchers encountering "nusance" in primary sources should treat it as a direct equivalent and consult the entry for NUISANCE for full doctrinal analysis.
Common Confusion
"Nusance" is not a separate legal doctrine. It is a spelling variant, and its appearance in historical documents reflects the inconsistency of English orthography before standardization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers unfamiliar with pre-modern legal texts occasionally treat variant spellings as distinct terms or assume transcription error. Neither inference is warranted. Burrill explicitly identifies "nusance" as "the old form of nuisance," and the two are interchangeable in meaning across all periods.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is navigational. Researchers working in manuscript records, Year Books, early printed reports, or colonial-era statutes will encounter "nusance" with some regularity. Variant spellings in historical legal materials are not errors and should not be silently corrected when transcribing or indexing primary sources, as the original spelling can itself be evidence of a document's date, provenance, or scribal tradition.
Burrill's cross-references to adjacent Law French terms — NUTAUNTRE (by night) and NUYT (night) — appearing immediately after the nusance entry are a reminder of how closely packed historical dictionaries organized their material alphabetically without modern topical separation. A researcher scanning Burrill for nuisance doctrine who encounters these entries should not mistake the proximity for doctrinal connection. The night-related terms are alphabetical neighbors, not related concepts.
When searching digitized corpora or historical indexes, running searches for both "nusance" and "nuisance" is advisable for any research period prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Optical character recognition errors in digitized sources may also produce "nusance" as a scan artifact of "nuisance," adding a further layer of ambiguity that requires source verification.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source in the Law Mind corpus with a discrete entry for this spelling variant. Burrill's treatment is terse but accurate: he identifies "nusance" as the old form, cites Hale's Analysis as authority, and moves on. Matthew Hale's analytical writing on common law categories used earlier orthographic conventions, and Burrill's citation to him anchors the variant spelling in a recognized scholarly lineage rather than treating it as mere scribal idiosyncrasy.
No other shelf dictionaries in the corpus — Black's, Bouvier's, or others — carry a separate entry for "nusance." They standardize to "nuisance" without comment on the older form, which reflects the later date of their principal editions and the consolidation of English legal spelling that had occurred by then. This means Burrill is the only dictionary source that explicitly bridges the old and modern forms, making it the essential reference for researchers working in documents that predate spelling standardization.