Definition
To pass the night; to remain overnight in a place. The term appears in Roman civil law contexts as a technical descriptor of physical presence or occupation extending through the night. Its primary legal relevance was in determining rights or conditions that depended on continuous or overnight presence — for instance, in questions of possession, domicile, or the vesting of property interests tied to temporal thresholds.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering pernoctare in civil law or Roman law materials should treat it as a term of physical presence rather than a term of legal status. Its significance is almost always contextual: the word itself means little in isolation, but it marks the condition upon which some other legal consequence turns — most commonly whether possession was maintained continuously, whether a traveler or occupant had established sufficient presence to trigger a legal rule, or whether a time-bound condition had been satisfied.
The term will appear almost exclusively in texts engaging directly with Roman law sources, particularly the Digest, or in early common law treatises borrowing civilian vocabulary. It does not have a naturalized English legal equivalent and does not appear in standard common law pleading or statutory practice. Researchers working in English equity or common law sources who encounter this term are likely looking at a passage drawing on Justinianic or Continental authority.
One navigational trap: Burrill's entry is fragmentary and contains what appears to be a transcription error or corrupted passage ("civil property, which is not to yest until after law" is incoherent and likely a printing defect in the source). Do not rely on Burrill's surrounding contextual language for this entry. The Digest reference — Dig. 50.16.166 — is the operative primary source, and researchers should consult that passage directly. Digest 50.16 is the title De verborum significatione (On the meaning of words), a standard location for Roman juristic definitions of technical terms, which confirms that pernoctare was treated as a defined term requiring authoritative explanation even within Roman legal practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only shelf-source entry for this term, and its value is limited. The definition itself — "to pass the night; to pass the whole night" — is accurate and consistent with classical Latin usage, but the surrounding contextual language in Burrill's entry is corrupted and cannot be used to draw substantive legal conclusions. Burrill correctly cites Dig. 50.16.166 as the source, which is the reliable anchor for any research into this term's legal meaning.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — appear to carry an entry for pernoctare, which itself signals the term's narrow scope: it is a Roman law term of art that never achieved sufficient circulation in common law practice to warrant independent treatment in the Anglo-American dictionary tradition. Its appearances in legal literature are essentially always quotations from or citations to the Digest, rather than living terms applied in English or American courts.
Jurisdictional Note
Pernoctare is a term of Roman civil law with no native common law jurisdiction. It may appear in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed civil law jurisdictions when drawing on civilian sources, and in historical English chancery or ecclesiastical materials where Roman law influence was strong. It has no operative significance in modern American or English statutory practice.