Definition
Peritura (Latin: "things about to perish") refers to perishable goods — property that is subject to natural deterioration, spoilage, or loss of value if not promptly managed or disposed of. The term appears in legal contexts primarily to describe the category of assets that impose a heightened duty of care on those responsible for managing another's property, including executors, administrators, trustees, and carriers. Examples historically recognized as peritura include fattened cattle, grain, fresh fruit, and any other commodity that will suffer materially from delay in handling or sale.
Common Confusion
Peritura is sometimes treated as interchangeable with "perishable goods" in modern usage, and functionally the terms overlap. The distinction worth preserving is that peritura is a term of art carrying specific doctrinal weight: it triggers affirmative duties on fiduciaries and modifies the standard liability framework for carriers. Calling something "perishable" in ordinary speech does not, by itself, invoke those legal consequences. Researchers encountering peritura in historical pleadings or treatises should resist collapsing it into the modern commercial usage of "perishable commodity," which carries its own regulatory meaning in areas such as agricultural trade law.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical significance of peritura in the Law Mind corpus falls along two distinct doctrinal lines, and researchers must be careful not to conflate sources that address them separately.
First, in estate administration: executors and administrators encountering peritura among estate assets were not merely permitted to sell promptly — they were affirmatively obligated to do so. Failure to act with due diligence exposed a fiduciary to personal liability for any loss in value. This duty was well-settled in English equity and carried into American practice. Sources treating executors' powers to sell generally may not flag the distinct urgency that attaches when the asset is peritura, so researchers should check specifically for discussions of perishable estate property rather than relying on general treatments of executor authority.
Second, in carrier liability: the ordinary common carrier's strict liability framework was modified for peritura. A carrier was generally not liable for injuries to perishable goods arising from the inherent nature of the goods themselves — the so-called "inherent vice" exception. This exception was heavily litigated and the boundary between carrier negligence and inherent deterioration was contested. Historical sources vary in how broadly they define inherent vice in this context, and Bouvier's entry appears to have been truncated in the surviving text, cutting off precisely at the carrier liability discussion. Researchers should cross-reference treatise sources on carrier law to fill that gap.
Chronologically, peritura as a Latin term of art fades from American legal writing across the nineteenth century, replaced by "perishable goods" or "perishable property" in both case law and statute. Researchers working in early American materials (pre-1850) are more likely to encounter the Latin form; later sources will use the English equivalent. The underlying doctrine, however, persists across the transition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source available for this term, and its entry, while brief, is substantive. Bouvier establishes two propositions: (1) that executors, administrators, and trustees bear an affirmative duty of due diligence in disposing of peritura; and (2) that carriers occupy a different position, with liability for perishable goods governed by distinct rules. Bouvier's supporting citations — Bacon's Abridgement under "Executors," Rolle's Abridgement, Coke's Reports, and several American cases — locate the doctrine firmly in the mainstream of Anglo-American common law and equity. The American citations (including a Virginia case from Munford's reports) confirm that the doctrine had been received and applied in early American courts, not merely inherited as foreign learning.
The entry's truncation on the carrier liability side is a research limitation. Bouvier plainly intended to state a rule about carrier non-liability for inherent deterioration of perishables, but the surviving text does not complete the proposition. Researchers should not infer the full rule from Bouvier alone on this point.
No other historical law dictionary in the current Law Mind corpus carries a discrete entry for peritura, which itself reflects the term's status as learned Latin rather than common legal vocabulary. The concept it names, however, appears across treatises on executorship, trust administration, and carrier law under English headings.
Jurisdictional Note
The duty of diligence with respect to perishable estate assets was recognized broadly across American jurisdictions following English equity practice, but the specific standard — what counts as sufficient promptness — varied by court and circumstance. Carrier liability for perishable goods diverged more sharply across jurisdictions and was eventually significantly shaped by federal regulation of interstate carriers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.