Definition
(Latin; Law Latin: pares) Equals; peers. In medieval English and feudal law, pares referred to a person's equals in rank or dignity — specifically, the body of peers or fellow-vassals who judged disputes among themselves in a lord's court. The term is the Latin plural of par (equal) and appears in historical legal sources in several related senses:
1. The jury, as originally constituted: the equals or peers of the parties to a dispute. Under the feudal system, a vassal was entitled to be judged by fellow vassals of the same lord — persons of equivalent standing — rather than by the lord alone or by strangers of inferior rank. This is the conceptual ancestor of the modern right to trial by jury of one's peers.
2. The freeholders of a neighborhood, in the sense of equals assembled to decide local questions of fact or right.
3. In feudal tenure specifically, the tenants who owed suit of court to the same lord and who constituted the judgment-body of that court.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "pares" in ordinary English is simply the third-person singular simple present of the verb "to pare" — meaning to peel or trim.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's treats "pares" purely as a verb form of "pare," with no legal sense acknowledged.
The gap here is total. A researcher encountering "pares" in a legal text has no guidance from ordinary English usage. The legal term is Latin, not English, and its meaning — equals, peers — has no relationship whatsoever to the common verb. Context (italics, Latin phrases surrounding it, feudal subject matter) is the only signal.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
PARES CURIÆ (also PARES CURTIS): "Peers of the court." In feudal and old English law, the suitors or vassals who owed suit to a lord's court and who collectively constituted the judging body of that court. Distinguished from the lord himself, who presided but did not judge. This is the form most frequently encountered in historical legal texts dealing with feudal tenure and the origins of jury trial.
CORAM PARIBUS: "Before equals" or "before peers." A related phrase appearing in old records, signifying proceedings conducted before one's equals — an early articulation of the procedural right that later developed into trial by jury.
Why It Matters in Research
Pares is encountered almost exclusively in historical legal materials: treatises on feudal tenure, medieval court records, constitutional history, and commentary on Magna Carta. Researchers will meet it most often in two contexts: (1) discussions of Chapter 39 (or Chapter 29 in the 1225 reissue) of Magna Carta, which guaranteed that no free man would be taken, imprisoned, or disseised except by the lawful judgment of his peers (per judicium parium suorum) — and (2) Blackstone's treatment of jury origins in the Commentaries, to which the historical dictionaries directly point (3 Bl. Comm. 349; 2 Bl. Comm. 315).
The critical research trap: modern editions of Magna Carta translate parium as "peers" or "equals," and the phrase has been read both as a guarantee of jury trial and as a privilege of the nobility to be tried by fellow nobles. These two readings pull in different directions historically and constitutionally. Sources from different periods will reflect different dominant interpretations. A researcher tracking the jury-trial lineage should not assume that pares in a 13th-century source means "jury" in anything like the modern sense.
The compound form pares curiæ is the more technically precise term when the feudal court context is at issue. When sources simply write pares without qualification, the surrounding context — feudal tenure discussion versus Magna Carta commentary versus jury-right argument — determines which sense is operative.
American legal sources use pares rarely and almost always in historical or comparative contexts. The term has no operative role in American positive law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are consistent on the core meaning — equals, peers, the judging body of a feudal court — but differ in depth. Black's (both editions) anchors the definition in Blackstone and emphasizes the connection between feudal vassalage and jury trial. Burrill's is the most useful for research: it separately defines pares curiæ, identifies the Magna Carta connection with specific chapter references, and points to secondary authority (the freeholder sense from 2 Bl. Comm. 315). Anderson's simply cross-references PEER without independent elaboration — useful as a redirect but not substantive.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is the contested interpretive history of per judicium parium suorum in Magna Carta — that is, whether the phrase guaranteed jury trial for all free men or a class-specific privilege of trial by noble peers. That debate is worked out in constitutional history and legal history scholarship rather than in the dictionaries themselves.
Jurisdictional Note
Pares is a term of English feudal law with no operative American jurisdiction. In American law it appears only as a term of art in historical or constitutional scholarship. It is not a term of art in any American jurisdiction's current positive law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Jury, Origins of; Magna Carta; Feudal Tenure; Trial by Peers.