Definition
Latin term from the civil law tradition meaning "to follow after" or "to pursue." In legal usage, persequi denotes the act of pursuing or claiming a right through formal legal process — that is, seeking legal redress by bringing an action. The term is most commonly encountered in the compound phrase jus persequendi, which refers to the right of pursuing or prosecuting a claim in a court of law. In this sense, persequi captures the procedural dimension of a right: not merely the underlying entitlement, but the actionable power to enforce it through the machinery of law.
Common Confusion
Persequi should not be confused with its cognate persecutio, which in Roman and civil law referred more specifically to the prosecution or pursuit of a legal action in its formal procedural sense. The distinction is subtle: persequi names the act of pursuing; persecutio names the formal pursuit as an institution or procedure. Researchers encountering either term in historical civil law materials should attend carefully to context to determine which sense is operative.
Why It Matters in Research
Persequi is a term of art drawn from Roman civil law and transmitted through the civil law tradition into English legal writing primarily as a doctrinal reference point, not as working courtroom vocabulary. Researchers will encounter it most often in treatises and digests discussing the nature of actions and rights — particularly in works that distinguish between having a right in substance and having the procedural capacity to enforce it.
The phrase jus persequendi is the more practically significant unit. When historical sources describe an actio as a jus persequendi, they are invoking the Roman law conception of an action as itself a right — the right to pursue what is owed to you. This framing, drawn from Justinian's Digest (specifically the definition attributed to Celsus), shaped how civil law writers and, derivatively, some common law commentators theorized the relationship between substantive rights and procedural remedies.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should note that persequi will appear almost exclusively in civil law commentaries, comparative law discussions, and texts dealing with the theoretical foundations of legal action — not in case law or statutes. When Black's and Burrill's define it identically, this signals that the term had no contested or evolving meaning in English legal dictionaries; it was simply imported as a fixed reference from the civil law. That uniformity is a useful signal: treat it as a stable doctrinal marker rather than a term whose meaning shifts across sources or periods.
The connection to actio is the most productive research thread. A researcher who encounters persequi in an older treatise and follows the cross-reference to actio will find the fuller apparatus of civil law action theory. Similarly, discussions of jus persequendi will often appear alongside treatments of obligatio and the distinction between real and personal actions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term, reproducing nearly identical definitions. This uniformity reflects the term's status as a direct Latin borrowing with no significant interpretive history in English-language legal lexicography. None of the three sources elaborates beyond the core definition and the jus persequendi reference, which confirms that persequi functioned in English legal writing as a citation term — invoked to ground an argument in civil law authority rather than debated in its own right.
Burrill's cross-reference to Actio is the most instructive element across all three sources. It directs the reader toward the conceptual home of the term: the Roman law theory of actions as rights. The absence of any case citations or statutory references in any of the historical sources is consistent with the term's role as doctrinal rather than operative vocabulary in the common law tradition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Actions (Civil Law); Jus; Obligatio