Definition
A judicial writ in old English law that issued between judgment and execution in a land recovery action involving a person in religious orders. When a religious person — an abbot, prior, or other member of a religious house — obtained a judgment to recover land, the writ directed the escheator (or, per Burrill, the sheriff) to inquire into two things: first, what right the religious person actually had to recover the land; and second, whether the judgment had been obtained by collusion between the parties. The writ's purpose was to protect the lord from being defrauded of his rights — particularly his incidents of tenure — through a fraudulent or collusive recovery engineered to place land in the hands of a religious house free of ordinary feudal obligations.
Why It Matters in Research
Quale jus is an archaic writ of narrow historical application. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in older English law materials — Year Books, early registers of writs, and treatises on feudal land law — rather than in any modern litigation context. The term has no living application in any common law jurisdiction.
The writ is tightly connected to the broader medieval anxiety about mortmain: the practice by which land granted to religious institutions became effectively inalienable, draining feudal lords of the services and incidents that land tenure was supposed to generate. Quale jus functioned as a procedural check on that drainage by inserting a judicial inquiry before a religious plaintiff could execute on a land judgment. Understanding it requires familiarity with the mortmain statutes (particularly the Statute of Mortmain, 7 Edw. I, 1279), the office and function of the escheator, and the mechanics of collusive recoveries in medieval English practice.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should be aware that quale jus entries across historical dictionaries are thin and occasionally inconsistent on procedure — specifically on whether the writ ran to the escheator or to the sheriff. That discrepancy (discussed further below) is not trivial if one is reconstructing the writ's procedural mechanics.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries substantially agree on the core definition but diverge on one procedural detail and differ in depth.
Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier all describe the writ as running to the escheator. Burrill, by contrast, says it commanded the sheriff. This is not merely a copying variation — the escheator was a royal officer specifically charged with matters involving land that might revert to or be claimed by the Crown, while the sheriff was a general county officer. Given that the inquiry concerned possible collusion and the rights of the lord (potentially the Crown itself), the escheator makes functional sense. Burrill's version may reflect a different source tradition or a conflation with a related writ form.
Burrill adds the most substantive gloss of the group, translating the Latin phrase as "what kind of right" and specifying that the inquiry also touched on damages — detail absent from the other sources. Burrill also cites Reg. Jud. 8, 16, 17, while Rapalje & Lawrence cite Reg. Jud. 8 alone, suggesting Burrill drew from a fuller reading of the Register of Judicial Writs.
Bouvier's entry is the thinnest — little more than a bare identification — and should not be relied on alone for research into this writ's operation.
None of the historical dictionaries situates quale jus explicitly within the mortmain framework or connects it to the Statute of Mortmain by name, which is a meaningful omission for any researcher trying to understand why the writ existed at all.
Jurisdictional Note
Quale jus was an English writ with no transplanted counterpart in American law. It belongs to a feudal land tenure system that the American states did not receive. Researchers encountering the term in American legal sources will find it only in historical surveys, comparative law discussions, or dictionary definitions — never as operative procedure.