PER AND CUI

Definition

Per and cui is an archaic classification of the writ of entry in English real property law, identifying the stage of removal at which a plaintiff's right of entry had been blocked by successive alienations from the original disseisor. Specifically, a writ of entry "in the per and cui" lay when the land had passed through two intermediate hands: the disseisor had conveyed to a first alienee (the per), and that alienee had in turn conveyed to a second alienee or descendant (the cui), against whom the writ was brought. The form of the writ recited that the tenant had entry neither by the disseisor alone nor by any single intermediate party, but by and under (per and cui) both a prior alienee and the disseisor together. The classification belongs to the medieval common law system of writs of entry, which were organized by degrees of removal from the original wrong. A writ in the per lay against the disseisor's first alienee; a writ in the per and cui lay against the second; and beyond two removes the plaintiff was left to the more cumbersome writ of right. The practical ceiling imposed by this system was a significant limitation on a landowner's ability to recover seisin, and it was eventually abolished by statute in England. ---

Common Confusion

Per and cui is sometimes conflated loosely with "the per" — the single-remove stage of the same writ. The two are distinct: the per lies against the disseisor's immediate transferee, while the per and cui lies one step further removed, against the party who received from that transferee. The distinction mattered practically because each stage required a different writ and different pleading. Neither should be confused with the writ of right, which was the last resort once the number of removes exceeded the range of writs of entry. The Latin words per (by) and cui (to whom) also appear in other legal contexts entirely unrelated to real property — most notably in phrases like per curiam or per se — and should not be read as carrying the writ-of-entry meaning outside that historical context. ---

Why It Matters in Research

Per and cui is a term of purely historical significance. No modern American or English jurisdiction retains writs of entry in this form; the classification was swept away along with the broader system of real actions long before American law was codified. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in three contexts: (1) pre-nineteenth-century English common law sources and treatises, particularly Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 181 is the locus classicus); (2) early American cases and treatises that engaged with inherited common law real property doctrine before modern statutory reform; and (3) legal dictionaries and encyclopedias that preserve the term for historical completeness. The primary research trap is underestimating how much the system of writs of entry shaped the vocabulary of early real property pleading. Documents from colonial or early republic courts may reference the per, the per and cui, or the writ of right as distinct procedural postures, and misreading them as equivalent will produce errors in understanding what remedy was available and why. When reading historical conveyancing records or equity pleadings that dispute title through a chain of alienations, the per-and-cui framework is the organizing logic behind references to "first alienee," "second alienee," and degrees of remove. Because the corpus of pre-reform common law materials in Law Mind is where this term lives, researchers should treat per and cui as an index into the broader architecture of real actions — cross-referencing disseisin, seisin, writ of entry, and writ of right to reconstruct the procedural context of any historical title dispute. ---

Historical Dictionary Support

Black's Law Dictionary (1st Ed.) provides a clean, serviceable definition keyed directly to Blackstone, accurately capturing the two-remove structure and the specific language of the writ. Bouvier's entry for the term is fragmentary in the available extract but is consistent with Blackstone's account. The second edition of Black's produced by the available source material contains no usable entry for this term — the excerpt corresponds to an unrelated passage on citizenship and political persons, suggesting a digitization or extraction anomaly in the source. All usable historical sources agree on the essentials: the writ in the per and cui addressed the second degree of alienation from the disseisor, the writ's language explicitly invoked both the prior alienee and the disseisor, and the system was grounded in Blackstone's analysis of real actions. No historical dictionary entry addresses the abolition of the writ or its displacement by modern ejectment doctrine, which is a gap researchers should supply from other sources. ---

Jurisdictional Note

Per and cui has no operative legal significance in any current jurisdiction. England abolished the real actions (including all forms of the writ of entry) by statute in the nineteenth century. American jurisdictions replaced the forms of real action with ejectment and, later, with statutory quiet title and summary possession proceedings. The term survives only as a historical artifact in legal dictionaries and common law scholarship. ---

Related Terms