Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "personally" or "in person." In old English law, the term described the manner in which an act was performed or an obligation was to be fulfilled — directly by the party themselves, without the intervention of an agent, attorney, or substitute. It appears in legal records, writs, and pleadings to specify that a duty, appearance, or service was owed or rendered by the individual personally rather than through a representative.
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Common Confusion
PERSONALITER vs. PER ALIUM: Personaliter (by oneself, in person) stands in contrast to per alium (through another, by an agent). In historical documents, distinguishing these terms is essential to understanding whether an obligation or act was a personal duty incapable of delegation or one that could be performed by a substitute. Researchers encountering one term in a historical source should check for the other as a contrasting concept within the same instrument or discussion.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the Latin vocabulary of medieval and early modern English legal practice and is unlikely to appear in modern primary sources. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical records: plea rolls, writs, Year Books, early equity proceedings, and treatises written before the plain-English movement reshaped legal drafting.
The primary research trap is treating personaliter as mere ornamentation. In historical sources, the word carried operative weight. When a writ or obligation required performance personaliter, it typically meant the duty was non-delegable — the personal character of the obligor was the point. This distinction had direct consequences in cases involving personal service obligations, appearances before courts, or duties attached to a particular office or status. Missing the term's function can cause a researcher to misread whether a historical legal relationship admitted of substitution or agency.
In plea and court records, personaliter often appears in phrases describing how a party appeared (comparuit personaliter — appeared in person) as distinct from appearance through counsel or attorney. This matters when reconstructing procedural history or determining whether a default or appearance was recorded as personal or representative.
The corpus connection to run: documents using personaliter frequently intersect with discussions of personal obligations, non-assignable duties, and the early law of agency and representation. Researchers working in those areas should treat this term as a signal pointing toward sources that predate the modern law of agency.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the core definition — "personally; in person" — and all three situate the term squarely in old English law. There is no divergence on meaning among the sources. Burrill's entry is fragmentary as preserved, cutting off after establishing the Latin and old English law context, but its framing is consistent with the others.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context for why the distinction mattered — the legal consequences of a duty being owed or performed personaliter versus through a representative. The shelf sources treat this as a simple translation entry rather than a term with doctrinal significance. Researchers should not infer from the brevity of these entries that the term was unimportant; Latin adverbs of this type often carried more operational weight in historical pleading practice than their dictionary entries suggest.
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Jurisdictional Note
Personaliter is a term of old English law and does not appear as a live term in modern American, English, or Commonwealth legal practice. It may appear in American colonial-era records that borrowed heavily from English pleading forms, but its use was not independently developed in American jurisdictions.
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