Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "for some cause arising out of a maritime matter." The phrase describes the foundational basis of admiralty jurisdiction — the requirement that a legal dispute have its origin in a maritime transaction or occurrence. It captures the essential limiting principle that admiralty courts do not exercise general jurisdiction but are confined to matters connected to the sea and maritime commerce.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase functions as a jurisdictional threshold formula rather than a standalone legal doctrine. Researchers encountering it in early American admiralty records or treatises should understand it as a shorthand for the core question in any admiralty proceeding: does the cause of action arise from a maritime matter? The phrase appears in early federal admiralty opinions where courts were actively defining the outer edges of admiralty jurisdiction in the new republic, a contested boundary that would not stabilize for decades.
The phrase is particularly useful as a research anchor in cases from the district courts sitting in admiralty during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where Latin maxims still served as doctrinal shorthand. Researchers working in that period should treat it as a signal that the court is engaging with jurisdictional legitimacy, not merely procedural form.
Because the phrase is closely tied to the French jurisdictional formula "pour le fait de la mer" — its acknowledged source — researchers tracing the intellectual lineage of American admiralty jurisdiction will need to move between English, Latin, and French sources. The jurisdictional concept itself derives from continental and English admiralty practice, and the Latin translation attributed to Selden bridges those traditions for American common law audiences.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only entry in the Law Mind corpus for this phrase. Black's defines it as "for some cause arising out of a maritime matter" and cites 1 Pet. Adm. 92 for the usage, identifying the phrase as Selden's translation of the French admiralty jurisdictional formula "pour le fait de la mer."
The attribution to Selden is significant. John Selden was a seventeenth-century English jurist and legal historian whose work on maritime law — particularly Mare Clausum — was foundational to both English and early American admiralty jurisprudence. His rendering of the French formula into Latin gave the concept currency in English legal scholarship and, subsequently, in American courts drawing on that tradition.
Black's does not elaborate on the doctrine beyond the translation and attribution, which is consistent with the phrase's role as a jurisdictional marker rather than a substantive rule. No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses this phrase directly, leaving Black's as the definitive secondary source for its meaning and provenance.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase appears in the context of federal admiralty jurisdiction under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which extends judicial power to "all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction." The question of what constitutes a "maritime matter" sufficient to ground admiralty jurisdiction has been the subject of extensive federal case law development, making this phrase a historical entry point into a living doctrinal debate rather than a closed historical curiosity.