Definition
Quo jure (Latin: "by what right") is an obsolete writ of old English practice that compelled a person claiming common rights over another's land to demonstrate the legal basis for that claim. Specifically, it lay in favor of a landowner against any person who asserted a right of common — most typically common of pasture — over that land, requiring the claimant to produce and show by what title or right the claim was made.
The writ served a quiet-title function in the narrow context of common rights: it did not resolve the substantive dispute on the merits but forced the claiming party to articulate and prove the legal foundation of the asserted right before that right could continue to be exercised.
Common Confusion
Quo jure is sometimes loosely associated with quo warranto, and Burrill's Law Dictionary compounds this by including both writs in a single entry. The two are distinct instruments. Quo warranto addressed claims to offices, franchises, or liberties asserted against the Crown or a governmental interest, and operated as a writ in the nature of a writ of right for the king. Quo jure addressed purely private disputes over rights of common in land. A researcher encountering either writ in historical records should confirm which writ is actually present before drawing conclusions about the nature of the proceeding.
Why It Matters in Research
Quo jure is an archaism with no modern procedural counterpart. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in pre-nineteenth-century English pleading records, Year Books, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, Cowell's Interpreter, or early American treatises reproducing English common law forms wholesale.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, because the writ fell out of use well before American independence, it carries essentially no American procedural history. Colonial and early American courts had no occasion to employ it in developed form, and its appearance in American legal dictionaries is purely encyclopedic, preserved to explain historical English sources.
Second, the Burrill entry conflates quo jure with quo warranto by running them together in a single passage without a clean break. Researchers relying on that entry alone risk misidentifying the writ's function or scope.
Third, the maxim appended to both Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence — "Quo ligatur, eo dissolvitur" (by the same mode by which a thing is bound, by that is it released) — appears in connection with quo jure as a companion maxim, not as an element of the writ itself. Its presence in the entry should not be read as substantively defining the writ's operation.
For corpus researchers, quo jure is most valuable as a contextual marker: its appearance in a historical source signals a dispute over rights of common, likely involving grazing, pasture, or related agricultural land use conflicts. It may appear in land records, manorial court proceedings, or early equity materials addressing rights appurtenant to land.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a writ compelling a claimant to show by what title a right of common was claimed over another's land. The standard citation anchor is Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (variously cited as F.N.B. 128 F or F.N.B. 158, a minor discrepancy likely reflecting different editions), with Cowell cited as additional authority. Burrill adds citations to the Registrum Omnium Brevium and Britton, providing deeper procedural grounding.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds the specific qualifier "common of pasture, time out of mind," which clarifies that the writ was particularly associated with prescriptive claims — rights asserted on the basis of immemorial custom — rather than rights established by express grant. This is useful precision absent from the Black's entries.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural mechanics of how the writ was returned, what evidence satisfied the "show by what title" requirement, and whether any American courts ever formally adopted or applied the writ. For those questions, researchers must look beyond the dictionary shelf to Fitzherbert directly or to the secondary literature on common rights in English agrarian legal history.
Jurisdictional Note
Quo jure is a creature of old English common law with no recognized American statutory or procedural equivalent. Its substantive function — quieting disputes over rights of common — would today be addressed in most American jurisdictions through a quiet title action or declaratory judgment proceeding. Researchers should not expect to find the writ operative in any modern jurisdiction.