Definition
Pendence is a rarely used legal term denoting the condition of a matter being pending — that is, undecided, in suspense, or awaiting resolution. It functions as an abstract noun equivalent to pendency, describing the state of a proceeding, claim, or action that has been initiated but not yet concluded. The term appears most often in older American and English legal writing as a condensed form of the more common pendency or the Latin phrase lis pendens.
In practice, pendence describes the interval between the commencement of a legal proceeding and its final determination, during which certain legal consequences — such as the suspension of limitations periods, the tolling of rights, or the attachment of notice to third parties — may attach.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Slope or inclination; alternatively, pendency or suspension in time; delay.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Slope; inclination. Marked as obsolete.
The physical sense — slope or incline — is entirely dead in legal usage and was already archaic by the nineteenth century. The legal meaning draws exclusively from the Latin root pendere (to hang, to be suspended), converging with the Wiktionary secondary sense of suspension or delay. A researcher encountering pendence in a legal document should not carry any physical or geometric connotation into the reading.
Common Confusion
Pendence and pendency are functionally interchangeable in older legal texts, but pendency has become the dominant modern form and is the term most researchers will encounter in contemporary treatises, statutes, and court rules. Pendence also overlaps conceptually with lis pendens, though lis pendens is the specific doctrine governing notice of pending litigation affecting real property — a narrower and more technically defined concept. Treating pendence as a synonym for lis pendens in all contexts overstates the term's precision; pendence simply means the state of being pending, which lis pendens then applies to a particular legal mechanism.
Why It Matters in Research
Pendence is a marker of archaic legal style. Encountering it in a source is itself informational: it tends to signal nineteenth-century American or English legal writing, and researchers should calibrate their reading accordingly.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is unhelpful on its face — the text as preserved appears to be a corrupted or misattributed fragment referencing declarations by parties in possession of land, with citations to Pennsylvania and New York reporters. This strongly suggests the dictionary entry as reproduced reflects an editorial or digitization error, and researchers should not treat it as authoritative guidance on pendence specifically. Cross-referencing the underlying cases (Penn. (N.J.) 706 and 4 Johns. (N.Y.) 234) independently is advisable before relying on the Rapalje & Lawrence source for this term.
For practical research, the term is most usefully followed upstream to pendency or lis pendens, both of which carry substantial modern authority and well-developed doctrine. Searches in historical corpus sources (Westlaw Vault, HeinOnline historical journals, early American digests) using pendence will return older materials; modern sources will use pendency almost exclusively. Do not assume silence in modern sources means the underlying doctrine is absent — it almost certainly survives under the updated terminology.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the sole historical dictionary source here, and as noted, the preserved entry appears corrupted. The dictionary fragment does not define pendence in any analytically useful way; it gestures toward land-related proceedings and party declarations but provides no coherent doctrinal content for this specific headword. Webster's 1913 confirms that the physical sense of slope was already marked obsolete by the time of that edition, suggesting the legal sense had long since eclipsed any common usage. No meaningful synthesis across shelf sources is possible from the available material.
Jurisdictional Note
No significant jurisdictional variation attaches to pendence as a standalone term. The doctrine it invokes — the legal consequences of a pending proceeding — varies considerably by jurisdiction, but those variations are captured under pendency and lis pendens, not under this term itself.