Definition
Ratione privilegii (Latin: "by reason of privilege") is a common law doctrine describing a species of qualified property in wild animals. Under this doctrine, a person acquires the right to hunt, kill, and take wild animals on the land of another — not by virtue of owning that land, but by virtue of holding a special franchise or privilege, historically granted by the English Crown. The right is attached to the privilege itself, not to the soil.
At common law, wild animals (ferae naturae) were generally incapable of being owned in the ordinary sense. Property rights in them arose only in limited ways. Ratione privilegii was one of those ways: the holder of a royal grant authorizing hunting over specified lands could assert a property interest in the game on those lands even as against the landowner, for so long as the animals remained there. The right was precarious — it attached only to animals actually on the privileged ground and was lost if they departed — but it was recognized as a legally cognizable interest enforceable against trespassers and poachers.
Common Confusion
Ratione privilegii is one of three common law doctrines that produced qualified property in wild animals, and the three are frequently blurred together in historical sources:
- Ratione soli: property in wild animals by reason of the soil — meaning the landowner has a qualified property right in game on their own land simply by virtue of ownership.
- Ratione privilegii: property by reason of a franchise or privilege — the right to take game on another's land, granted by royal prerogative.
- Ratione loci: sometimes used in connection with game preserves and enclosed parks where animals have been reduced to a kind of possession.
The critical distinction between ratione soli and ratione privilegii is the source of the right. Ratione soli runs with land ownership; ratione privilegii runs with the franchise. A researcher encountering either term in historical game law, poaching prosecutions, or property treatises must identify which doctrine the source is applying, as they generate different legal consequences for third parties.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English property law and game law contexts. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
1. Common law property treatises discussing the classification of animals and the nature of property interests in ferae naturae. Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II) provides the foundational framework within which ratione privilegii sits, even where that precise phrase does not always appear.
2. English game law cases and poaching prosecutions, particularly from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, when franchise rights over game were actively litigated and the distinction between the landowner's ratione soli right and a franchise-holder's ratione privilegii right had practical enforcement consequences.
3. American reception-of-common-law materials. Early American courts inherited the common law framework for wild animal property but largely rejected the franchise dimension of ratione privilegii — there being no royal prerogative in the United States to grant such privileges. American courts instead developed state ownership doctrines and landowner rights largely under ratione soli principles. Researchers tracing American wildlife law back to English roots need to recognize that ratione privilegii did not transplant cleanly and is largely a historical artifact in U.S. doctrine.
4. Environmental and natural resources law history. Scholars examining the evolution of public trust doctrine, state wildlife ownership, and the transition from franchise-based to regulatory game management will find ratione privilegii marking an important conceptual boundary.
The citation in Black's to "106 E. C. L. 870" references the English Common Law Reports series; researchers working with this citation should be aware that the abbreviated form is characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century English law reporting conventions and may require cross-referencing to identify the underlying decision.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. Its definition is accurate and concise: a franchise-based right to kill and take wild animals on another's land, derived from a Crown grant. Black's correctly identifies this as a "species of property," consistent with the common law classification of wild animal rights as qualified rather than absolute property interests.
What Black's does not capture is the doctrinal context: the relationship of ratione privilegii to the broader common law taxonomy of ferae naturae, the role of royal forests and game laws in producing these franchise rights, and the doctrine's effective obsolescence in American jurisdictions. Treatise sources — particularly Blackstone, Kent's Commentaries, and later American property treatises — provide the fuller picture that Black's compressed entry presupposes.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses this term. Its absence from Bouvier and other American law dictionaries is itself informative: the franchise dimension of English game law was not a working concept in American practice, and American compilers largely omitted it.
Jurisdictional Note
Ratione privilegii is a doctrine of English common law with no direct American equivalent. American courts adopted the ratione soli dimension of wild animal property law but rejected franchise-based rights as inconsistent with republican government and the absence of royal prerogative. U.S. wildlife law developed instead through state ownership doctrines and police power regulation. The term retains relevance in American legal history scholarship but has no operative modern application in U.S. jurisdictions.