Definition
Per and post are Latin-derived terms of art from the old English law of real property, used to distinguish two fundamentally different bases by which a person might claim title to land vacated by another.
To come in in the per is to claim through the person who was last entitled to the estate. The claimant derives their title from that prior holder — standing in their shoes, so to speak. The classic examples are heirs who inherit from a deceased owner, or assigns who take by conveyance from a grantee. The chain of title runs through the preceding holder.
To come in in the post is to claim by a title that is paramount and independent — one that operates not through the prior holder but over and above them, cutting in from outside the chain. The lord's right of escheat is the standard illustration: when a tenant died without heirs and without a valid conveyance, the land reverted to the lord not because the lord claimed through the tenant, but because the lord's superior feudal title reasserted itself by operation of law.
The practical distinction is between derivative title (per) and independent or superior title (post). A claimant in the per takes subject to whatever encumbrances and interests attached to the estate during the prior holder's tenure. A claimant in the post takes free of those burdens, because their title does not flow through the tainted or burdened ownership — it supersedes it.
Common Confusion
Per and post should not be confused with per se, a distinct Latin phrase meaning "in itself" or "by itself," which appears in negligence doctrine and antitrust law with no connection to property title. The overlap in Latin vocabulary has occasionally caused students to conflate these unrelated doctrines. Equally, post here has nothing to do with post-conviction procedure or the temporal sense of "after" — it refers solely to a superior or paramount source of title.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of medieval English land law that survived into American legal dictionaries largely as historical scaffolding. Researchers are most likely to encounter per and post in:
— Feudal tenure materials, where the distinction between claiming through a grantor versus claiming by escheat, forfeiture, or other paramount title determined what encumbrances survived the transfer.
— Older treatises on real property and title, particularly those engaging with common law inheritance doctrine, where whether an heir claimed per or post affected their exposure to the ancestor's debts and obligations.
— Historical case law analyzing escheat, attainder, and reversion, where courts needed to establish whether a public claim to land arose from inside or outside the broken chain of private title.
The per/post distinction is largely obsolete in modern American practice. Escheat survives but is now governed by statute, and the feudal architecture that made this distinction operationally critical has been dismantled. A researcher encountering per and post in 19th-century American case law or treatises should treat it as a signal that the court is reasoning from common law feudal principles — and should look carefully at whether the jurisdiction had modified or abolished those principles by statute at the relevant time.
The term does not appear in modern statutory codes and is unlikely to surface in any post-20th-century judicial opinion except in historical quotation. If you encounter it in a chain-of-title dispute or an escheat proceeding, the question to ask is whether the claimant's right flows through the former holder (per) or asserts a prior and independent legal superiority (post).
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement on the definitions, using nearly identical language across all three sources. All three use the same two examples: heirs or assigns of the grantee for the per, and the lord by escheat for the post. This consistency reflects the fact that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, per and post were already historical terms — there was no active doctrinal controversy to generate divergence.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the practical legal consequence of the distinction, which was substantial in its time. A person claiming in the per was bound by intermediate encumbrances, creditors' claims, and dower rights that had attached during the prior holder's tenure. A claimant in the post — the lord taking by escheat, or the crown acting on forfeiture — took the land clear of those private burdens. The dictionaries record the vocabulary without explaining why courts and practitioners needed it.
Rapalje & Lawrence omits the definite article used in Black's ("in the per" versus "in the post"), a minor textual variation with no substantive significance.