Definition
Passim (Latin: "here and there," "throughout") is a citation signal indicating that a proposition, principle, or discussion appears at multiple places throughout a source, rather than at a single identifiable page or passage. It tells the reader that the referenced material is distributed across the source and cannot be pinned to one location.
In legal writing, passim appears in footnotes, briefs, and scholarly works when a cited authority discusses a point so pervasively that pinpoint citation would be impractical or misleading. Example: "Smith v. Jones, passim" signals that the case's relevance is not confined to a single holding or passage but runs through the opinion broadly.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "That occurs at various places throughout a text."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Here and there; everywhere; as, this word occurs passim in the poem."
The common meaning and the legal meaning are essentially identical in substance — both describe something scattered throughout a text. The gap worth noting for researchers is one of use rather than meaning: in ordinary prose passim is descriptive, while in legal citation it is a deliberate methodological choice carrying its own citation convention rules and, in some style guides, its own disfavored status.
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Why It Matters in Research
Passim is a citation signal, not a substantive legal term, so researchers encounter it as a navigation problem rather than a legal concept problem. Several traps are worth knowing:
**Pinpoint evasion.** When a source uses passim, the reader cannot go directly to the controlling page. In older legal materials — treatises, digests, and court opinions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — passim citations are common and frequently stand in for what modern citation practice would demand as a pinpoint. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should treat a passim citation as an instruction to read the cited work in full on that point, not as a shortcut.
**Style guide restrictions.** The Bluebook and ALWD Guide to Legal Citation treat passim with caution. Bluebook Rule 3.2(a) permits passim only when a point is truly so dispersed that no single page can be cited; it discourages use as a substitute for proper pinpoint citation. Researchers evaluating the quality or credibility of a brief should note whether passim is used legitimately or as a drafting shortcut.
**Historical usage in statutes and treatises.** Bouvier's own example — "see the Trade Marks Act, 1905, passim" — reflects a common nineteenth and early twentieth century practice of citing entire statutes or treatises passim when arguing that a principle pervaded the whole instrument. This usage appears frequently in Law Mind's historical corpus. It does not mean the cited statute contains a single controlling provision; it means the point is structural to the whole document.
**Distinguishing passim from cf. and generally.** In historical sources, passim and "generally" are sometimes used interchangeably, and "cf." occasionally performs similar work. These are not synonymous signals. Researchers tracing an argument through older authorities should be alert to this slippage.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is spare: "In various places. Used with regard to an author, book, statute, etc., in such a reference as 'see the Trade Marks Act, 1905, passim.'" This is accurate as far as it goes. The Latin dictionary tradition confirms the root sense — passim derives from pando, meaning to spread or scatter, and in classical Latin carried the physical image of movement in all directions without fixed course.
What Bouvier does not address, and what later citation guides develop, is the normative question of when passim is appropriate versus when it is a crutch. The historical dictionaries treat it as purely descriptive; modern citation manuals treat it as a signal that requires justification.
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Jurisdictional Note
Passim carries no jurisdiction-specific legal meaning. Its use is governed by citation style conventions — primarily the Bluebook in U.S. legal practice — rather than by statute or case law. Academic legal writing and international legal materials may apply different citation conventions, and passim may appear more freely in those contexts.
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