Definition
Parte is a Latin-origin term appearing in several historical English and Anglo-American legal phrases, most commonly as a component of compound writs or procedural designations. It does not function as a standalone legal term but carries distinct legal meaning in each compound context in which it appears.
1. De rationabili parte (also: writ of reasonable part). A common-law writ available to the wife and children of a deceased man to recover their "reasonable part" of his personal goods — the share he could not lawfully bequeath away from them. In gavelkind tenure and among coparceners, a related writ lay between siblings or other co-heirs deprived of their rightful share of inherited lands in fee simple.
2. Ex parte. The most common surviving use. Describes a proceeding, application, or order made at the request of and for the benefit of one party only, without notice to or participation by any adverse party. An ex parte order is issued when urgency, secrecy, or the nature of the relief requires acting before the opposing party can be heard.
3. In parte. In part; partially. Used in older pleadings and judicial instruments to describe partial satisfaction, partial performance, or partial adjudication.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An obsolete spelling of "part."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Part" in its ordinary English senses — a portion, share, or side.
The gap between common and legal usage is significant primarily in compound phrases. In legal Latin, parte does not mean merely "part" in the everyday sense of a portion of something. In de rationabili parte, it denotes a legally defined share carrying heritable and customary rights. In ex parte, it means "side" or "party" in the adversarial sense, not a portion at all. A researcher encountering parte in an archival legal document should not read it through the lens of modern English "part" without first identifying the full Latin phrase.
Common Confusion
Ex parte is the compound most frequently misread or misapplied. Researchers sometimes treat any single-party filing as an "ex parte" matter, but the term carries a specific procedural meaning: it designates proceedings where the opposing party was intentionally excluded or had no notice, not merely proceedings where one party filed first. Separately, de rationabili parte (goods) and de rationabili parte bonorum are sometimes conflated with dower rights (rationabilis dos), but they address different assets — personal goods versus real property dower — and ran on different procedural tracks in equity and common law.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
De rationabili parte: Writ for recovery of the reasonable share of a decedent's personal goods.
De rationabili parte bonorum: A variant form specifically naming the goods (bona) at issue.
Ex parte: One-sided proceeding or order; the dominant modern survival of parte in legal usage.
In parte: Partial; used in instruments addressing partial relief or partial performance.
Why It Matters in Research
Parte in historical sources is almost never freestanding. It appears as part of a Latin phrase, and the meaning shifts entirely depending on the surrounding words. Researchers working in probate history, ecclesiastical court records, or early equity materials will encounter de rationabili parte in disputes over distributive shares of decedents' estates — a precursor to modern forced-share and elective-share statutes. Confusing this writ with dower actions (which concerned land, not goods) will send a researcher down the wrong procedural line.
Ex parte is the live term: it appears constantly in modern court filings, emergency protective orders, and administrative proceedings. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should note that ex parte orders in family law contexts — particularly emergency orders of protection — are governed by distinct procedural standards and have significant constitutional due process dimensions. The historical meaning of ex parte was broader and less procedurally defined than its modern usage, which is now typically bounded by court rules governing notice and the duration of orders issued without a hearing.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry for de rationabili parte inadvertently runs into unrelated material (rationabilis dos, ratihabitio), a common artifact of 19th-century dictionary formatting. Researchers should not treat those adjacent entries as part of the definition of parte itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary identifies the writ of right of reasonable part as applying between privies in blood — brothers in gavelkind, sisters, and other coparceners — for fee simple lands. Rapalje & Lawrence focuses instead on the personal property dimension: the writ for wife and children to recover the goods a decedent could not bequeath away. These two framings are complementary rather than contradictory; they describe overlapping but distinct applications of the same underlying principle that a decedent's family retained a legal claim to a portion of the estate regardless of testamentary direction.
What historical dictionaries do not adequately address is the procedural obsolescence of de rationabili parte. This writ had largely fallen out of use in American jurisdictions before Black's first edition; its practical successor in most states is the statutory elective share or forced heir provision. Historical dictionaries treat it as a live writ because they are organized around English common law forms that persisted longer in England than in most American states.
Neither source covers ex parte with the depth the term merits, reflecting the fact that 19th-century dictionaries organized under Latin headwords often buried procedural terms that would today warrant full standalone entries.
Jurisdictional Note
De rationabili parte was never uniformly adopted across American jurisdictions and is functionally extinct in modern American practice, replaced by statutory elective-share regimes. Ex parte procedure varies significantly by jurisdiction in terms of permissible duration, required showings, and obligations to serve the opposing party after an order issues. Family court ex parte orders of protection are heavily regulated by state statute and, in the domestic violence context, by federal law under the Violence Against Women Act.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia, family_171: Domestic Violence — Emergency / Ex Parte Orders of Protection. (Primary cross-reference for ex parte in practice.)