Definition
A Latin term from old conveyancing practice meaning "to ratify" — that is, to make valid or to give legal force to a prior act or instrument. Derived from *ratus* (valid, established) and *facere* (to make), the word appears in deeds of confirmation as a formal operative word signifying that the grantor or confirming party endorses and gives effect to a prior conveyance or grant. In this function, it operates alongside or in place of *confirmare* (to confirm), with which it was treated as legally equivalent.
Common Confusion
Lord Coke, commenting on Littleton, held *ratificare* to be "equipollent to *confirmare*" — that is, the two words were interchangeable in operative effect within a deed. Researchers encountering one should not assume the other is absent from the transaction; the distinction, if any, was one of drafting preference rather than legal consequence. Modern ratification doctrine (the act of approving a prior unauthorized act) descends from the same conceptual root but operates in a broader and substantively different legal framework than the narrow conveyancing formula *ratificare* represented.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of historical conveyancing formalism. Its appearance in a deed signals a confirmation instrument — a document designed to remedy a defect, cure a flaw in title, or give force to an earlier conveyance that was imperfect or voidable. Researchers working with medieval and early modern land records, indentures, or deeds of confirmation will encounter *ratificare* as part of a cluster of operative words that had precise legal significance under the old learning on conveyancing.
The critical research trap is treating *ratificare* as synonymous with modern ratification in contract or agency law. The word in old deeds is a formal operative term in a deed of confirmation — its function is to perfect or validate a prior instrument affecting real property, not to approve an agent's unauthorized act or accept a voidable contract. Conflating the two meanings will distort analysis of historical documents.
Burrill's entry points to Littleton's *Tenures*, section 515, as the primary source, with Coke's commentary in *Co. Litt.* (Coke on Littleton) at 295b providing the equipollence ruling. Any researcher tracing the doctrinal meaning of *ratificare* in historical conveyancing should consult those sources directly. The term does not appear to have survived into modern deed drafting as a live operative word; it is principally encountered in historical instruments and the treatise literature interpreting them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. Burrill correctly identifies the Latin components, locates the term in old conveyancing practice, and flags the equipollence with *confirmare* on Coke's authority. The entry is brief but accurate in its essentials.
What Burrill does not address — and what the corpus generally leaves undeveloped — is the broader doctrinal context of deeds of confirmation in which *ratificare* functioned. The old learning distinguished between confirmation that operated by way of enlargement, by way of passing a new interest, and by way of estoppel; *ratificare* could appear across these categories. Researchers needing that fuller context should look beyond the dictionary literature to treatises on real property conveyancing, particularly Sheppard's *Touchstone of Common Assurances* and Coke's own discussion in the *Institutes*.
No other historical dictionary in general circulation (Black's, Bouvier's, Tomlin's) carries a dedicated entry for *ratificare* as distinct from *ratification*, which reflects the term's confinement to specialist historical conveyancing contexts.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to the English common law conveyancing tradition and its American colonial and early national inheritance. It has no independent doctrinal life in modern civil law jurisdictions, where confirmation of acts is governed by different vocabulary and conceptual frameworks.