Definition
A Latin term from the civil law meaning to pass over, leave out, omit, neglect, or refuse. The term carried two related but distinct senses in classical Roman legal usage: (1) the act of passing over or leaving something out — as when a testator omits an heir from a will — and (2) the act of neglecting or refusing to do something — as in failing to perform a legal duty or declining to exercise a right.
Why It Matters in Research
OMITTERE is a term of art in the civilian tradition and appears most often in Latin-language legal texts, Roman law commentaries, and early common law treatises that drew on civil law sources. Researchers encountering the term in historical documents should pay close attention to context: the "leaving out" sense and the "neglect or refusal" sense are related but legally distinct, and conflating them can distort the meaning of the passage.
The term has particular relevance in the law of succession. In Roman law, the pretermission or passing over of a sui heres — a direct heir — in a will without express disinheritance was a legally significant act, and omittere was the verb used to describe it. This connects directly to doctrines of forced heirship and pretermitted heirs that persisted into civil law jurisdictions and influenced Louisiana, Quebec, and other mixed systems.
Researchers working in early English equity or ecclesiastical court records may also encounter omittere in contexts involving the neglect of duties — for example, the failure of an executor to act, or refusal to exercise an office. In this usage, omittere shades toward the English law concept of nonfeasance.
Because the term appears almost exclusively in untranslated Latin passages of historical sources, Law Mind corpus researchers should use it as a search key primarily in primary Latin-language documents, early civilian commentaries, and law dictionaries with civilian coverage. Its presence in a document is itself a signal that the drafter was working in or drawing from the civil law tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most direct coverage, drawing on Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum (Calv. Lex.) for both senses. Burrill distinguishes the two meanings — passing over or leaving out, and neglecting or refusing — and credits both to Calvinus, indicating the dual usage was established in the civilian reference tradition by at least the early modern period.
What Burrill and the historical dictionaries do not address is how omittere interacted with specific procedural or doctrinal consequences in different contexts. The word itself is neutral as to intent; Roman law and later civilian doctrine did the work of determining whether a particular omission had legal effect, required remedy, or constituted fault. Researchers should not read a normative judgment into the term itself — omittere describes an act of leaving out or failing to act, not necessarily a wrongful one.
No substantive treatment of omittere appears in common law dictionaries such as Black's or Bouvier's in their standard editions, reflecting the term's essentially civilian character.