Definition
Perpars (Latin Law). A share or portion of an inherited estate; specifically, the distinct part of an inheritance allotted to a co-heir upon partition. The term appears in Latin legal writing to describe the individual share that falls to each party when an undivided inheritance is divided among multiple heirs.
Common Confusion
Perpars and purpart (or purparty) are functionally the same concept expressed in different registers. Perpars is the Latin form; purpart/purparty is the law French and later English common law form. A researcher encountering one should immediately look up the other. Neither should be confused with moiety, which also describes a fractional share of an estate but carries distinct connotations and does not require partition to arise.
Why It Matters in Research
Perpars is a term of medieval Latin law that researchers are most likely to encounter in early English legal treatises and Year Books rather than in modern case law. Its primary relevance in the Law Mind corpus is as a precursor concept to the English common law term purpart (also rendered purparty), which is the form the word took as legal writing shifted from Latin to law French and then to English. A researcher who encounters perpars in a Latin source and does not recognize its connection to purpart may fail to follow the concept forward through later authorities.
The corrupted text appearing in the first edition of Black's — which runs perpars into a mid-sentence description of corporate perpetual succession — is an artifact of typesetting or binding error in the source edition. It does not reflect the meaning of perpars and should be disregarded. The second edition entry and Bouvier's are the reliable references.
Researchers working with partition actions, coparcenary, or the descent and distribution of real property in historical common law sources should treat perpars as the Latin-register equivalent of purpart. The two terms describe the same legal reality at different periods in the linguistic history of the common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical dictionaries agree on the core meaning: perpars denotes a portion of an inheritance. Bouvier's, citing Fleta — the late thirteenth-century Latin treatise on English law — provides the most authoritative grounding, confirming that the term was current in serious legal Latin writing of that era. Black's second edition renders the definition cleanly and without the printing anomaly found in the first. Neither Black's edition elaborates on the procedural context, and none of the three dictionaries address how perpars functioned in relation to partition proceedings or the rights of coparceners, which limits their utility for substantive research beyond identification of the term.