Definition
Przeteritio (also spelled praeteritio) is a Roman law term for the act of a testator silently passing over an heir — neither formally instituting that person as a beneficiary nor formally disinheriting them. The omission was not accidental in the ordinary sense; rather, it was a deliberate or constructive failure to address a compulsory heir in the will at all. Roman law treated this silence as legally consequential, distinct from both an express bequest and an express exclusion.
Under Roman testamentary law, certain heirs — most importantly sui heredes, those subject to the paterfamilias's legal authority at the time of his death — had a right to be explicitly acknowledged in the will. A testator who wished to exclude such an heir was required to do so by express disinheritance (exheredatio). Silence, instead of disinheritance, constituted przeteritio and carried its own legal consequences: in some cases, the pretermitted heir could challenge or partially invalidate the will; in others, the will was rendered void as to that heir's share or entirely.
Common Confusion
Przeteritio is sometimes conflated with exheredatio (express disinheritance) or with the querela inofficiosi testamenti (the complaint that a will was undutiful). These are related but distinct concepts. Exheredatio requires explicit words of exclusion; przeteritio arises precisely from their absence. The querela inofficiosi testamenti was a separate remedy available when a testator left an heir less than their rightful portion — it attacked a will that did address the heir, albeit insufficiently. Przeteritio, by contrast, concerns the complete silence of the will on the heir's status.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Roman law sources, civil law jurisdictions, or the history of succession law will encounter przeteritio most often in two contexts: (1) treatises and commentaries tracing the civilian tradition of forced heirship, and (2) historical discussions of the pretermitted heir doctrine that survives in various forms in Louisiana, Quebec, and other mixed or civil law systems.
The term appears infrequently in Anglo-American common law sources because common law generally does not impose the same forced-heirship framework on testators. A researcher searching English-language legal dictionaries for the doctrine will find sparse coverage; Black's 2nd Edition is a notable exception in the historical dictionary corpus. The concept resurfaces, however, in comparative law scholarship and in American jurisdictions with pretermitted heir statutes — statutory descendants of the Roman rule — though those statutes typically use the anglicized term "pretermission" rather than przeteritio.
Be alert to spelling variants: praeteritio is the classical Latin spelling; przeteritio appears in some early modern legal texts influenced by Polish or Central European manuscript traditions. In database searches, both spellings and the English derivative "pretermission" may be needed to capture the full range of relevant sources.
The maxim appended to the Black's entry — Praetextu liciti non debet admitti illicitum ("Under pretext of legality, what is illegal ought not to be admitted") — is unrelated to przeteritio and appears to be a typographical artifact of the original dictionary's pagination. Do not treat it as substantively connected to the term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the primary English-language historical dictionary treatment of this term, defining it as "[a] passing over or omission" and directing readers to Mackeldey's Roman Law, § 711, which remains a standard civilian reference for the doctrine. The Black's entry is accurate but brief, and it does not attempt to trace the doctrine's reception into modern civil law systems or its partial absorption into common law pretermitted heir statutes.
Historical sources in the civilian tradition — Mackeldey, Pothier, Domat — treat przeteritio with considerably more depth, distinguishing between the consequences for sui heredes versus emancipated children, and between the effect under the strict jus civile versus the later praetorian modifications. Researchers relying on Black's alone will have a serviceable definition but will miss these distinctions entirely.
No common-language entry exists for this term in Webster's 1913 or Wiktionary; it is pure legal and historical Latin with no general English usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The doctrine survives in functional form in civil law and mixed jurisdictions. Louisiana's pretermitted heir statutes reflect the Roman inheritance; Quebec's reserved portion rules operate from similar roots. Common law states recognize pretermitted heir statutes of their own, but these are creatures of statute rather than direct applications of Roman doctrine, and the term przeteritio itself does not appear in their case law.