Definition
In Roman law, a przelegatum (also spelled praelegatum) is a testamentary disposition by which a testator grants to one of several co-heirs an advance distribution of all or part of that heir's expected share of the inheritance, or an additional benefit beyond the ordinary share. The recipient receives this allotment before the general division of the estate among all heirs, setting it apart from the ordinary legacy available to non-heirs. It functions as a preferential bequest to a person who is simultaneously an heir, giving that person something over and above — or in anticipation of — what the general inheritance would otherwise yield.
The concept corresponds broadly to "advancement" in English and American law, though the Roman law mechanism operated within a distinct testamentary structure governed by rules about forced heirship and the falcidian portion.
Common Confusion
Przelegatum is sometimes loosely equated with legatum (legacy) in general. The distinction is structural: an ordinary legacy goes to someone who is not an heir, or to an heir in a capacity entirely separate from heirship. A przelegatum specifically involves a co-heir receiving a preferential distribution as part of — or in advance of — the inheritance itself. The recipient wears two hats simultaneously: legatee and heir. This double role creates the computational complexity that Roman jurists addressed through rules about collation and the falcidian fourth.
Researchers should also avoid conflating przelegatum with the concept of a specific bequest (legatum per vindicationem or legatum per damnationem) in Roman law. Those categories address the mechanism of transfer; przelegatum addresses the relationship between the recipient and the estate as a whole.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are unlikely to encounter przelegatum as a live legal term in common law sources, but it appears with some regularity in treatises on Roman law, civil law, and comparative succession law from the nineteenth century and earlier. Any corpus search touching on Roman inheritance, civil law testamentary doctrine, or the historical foundations of advancement and hotchpot rules may surface this term.
The critical navigational point: przelegatum sits at the intersection of legacy law and heirship law in Roman doctrine — a space that produces terminology overlap and frequent cross-referencing in historical sources. Researchers tracing the civil law roots of advancement doctrine in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed jurisdictions should treat przelegatum as a potential upstream concept for rules that eventually migrated into those systems.
Black's cross-reference to Mackeld's Roman Law (§ 762) is the most accessible nineteenth-century secondary source for English-language readers. Mackeldey's treatise was widely used in American law schools during the period when Roman law retained pedagogical prominence, so corpus materials from roughly 1820–1890 may assume reader familiarity with the term.
Spelling variation is a practical research hazard. The Latinized form praelegatum is the more classical rendering and will appear more frequently in formal legal Latin texts and civilian treatises. Przelegatum appears in some dictionary and digest sources but is the less common orthographic form. Any corpus search should run both spellings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the sole direct dictionary entry among standard English-language legal reference works. The definition is brief but accurate: a payment in advance of the whole or part of the heir's expected share, with an explicit comparative note linking it to advancement in Anglo-American law. The reference to Mackeldey's Roman Law § 762 is the significant value-add, pointing researchers toward the treatise context in which the term was most fully elaborated for English-language audiences.
Historical legal dictionaries in the civil law tradition — Calvinus, Spelman, and their successors — would address praelegatum in fuller doctrinal context, distinguishing it from the ordinary legatum (legacy to a non-heir) and addressing the computational rules governing how the przelegatum was charged against the heir's share in the final division. English-language sources are sparse on this detail; the gap reflects the marginal position of Roman succession doctrine in common law legal education after roughly 1870.
Jurisdictional Note
Przelegatum is a term of Roman law with no direct counterpart in English common law. Its practical descendants — advancement, hotchpot, and collation rules — appear in equity and statute across common law jurisdictions, but under entirely different terminology. In Louisiana and other civil law or mixed jurisdictions, succession law retains structural features closer to the Roman model, and older Louisiana treatises and cases may employ civil law terminology with greater fidelity to Roman sources.