Definition
A Latin term from Roman and common law meaning "to recover" — that is, to get back something lost, or to obtain a remedy through legal judgment. The term appears most prominently in two contexts:
1. As a verb in Latin legal formulas: recuperare means to recover property, money, or rights that have been taken or lost. It carries the sense of restoration to a prior state — returning what was amissum (lost) to the power of the one who held it.
2. As the root of the judgment formula "quod recuperet": This phrase — meaning "that he may recover" — was the standard Latin expression used in common law judgments rendered in favor of a plaintiff. When a court entered judgment for the plaintiff, the formal record would state that the plaintiff quod recuperet the sum, property, or damages at issue. RECUPERARE is thus the infinitive underlying the most routine act in civil litigation: a court's declaration that the prevailing party shall have what they sought.
Common Confusion
RECUPERARE should not be confused with RECUSARE (to reject or object) or RECUSATIO (a formal objection, particularly to a witness or judge). Burrill's entry for RECUPERARE appears adjacent to material on RECUSATIO TESTIS — the civil law rejection of a witness — and a researcher scanning Latin terms in historical sources may conflate the two. The roots are distinct: recuperare derives from capere (to take or seize), while recusare derives from causa (reason, cause), carrying the sense of refusing or objecting on stated grounds.
Why It Matters in Research
RECUPERARE is rarely a standalone research target; its significance is almost entirely structural and documentary. Researchers encounter it when reading original Latin pleadings, court records, or Year Book materials in which English common law procedure was recorded in Latin. Latin was the language of formal English court records until the Pleading in English Act 1362 began pushing vernacular use in pleadings, but Latin persisted in formal record-keeping — particularly in enrolled judgments — well into the eighteenth century. Parliament did not abolish Latin from court records until 1731 (4 Geo. II c. 26). Until that reform, quod recuperet and its variants appeared in virtually every plaintiff's judgment on the rolls.
For corpus researchers, the practical payoff is this: when reading pre-1731 English court records, plea rolls, or abridgments, a plaintiff's judgment will not say "the plaintiff shall recover" in plain English — it will say quod recuperet or a close variant. Recognizing RECUPERARE as the root of that formula is essential to reading those records accurately and to understanding whether a judgment was entered for plaintiff or defendant.
The term also marks the conceptual boundary between Roman law recovery language and common law adaptation. Classical Roman law used recuperare broadly; English common law absorbed the term into its own formal vocabulary while restricting it largely to the judgment formula. Researchers moving between civilian sources and common law sources should note that recuperare in a Roman law context may describe a wider range of restitutionary actions than the narrower English usage implies.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson and Burrill agree on the core definition: recuperare means to recover, to regain, to get back what was lost. Anderson is compressed, noting the literal derivation (re-capere, to take again) and pointing directly to the quod recuperet formula as the ordinary judgment form for a prevailing plaintiff. His entry is a functional cross-reference to RECOVER rather than a developed treatment.
Burrill is slightly fuller, supplying the Roman law gloss from Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum — quod amissum in nostram potestatem redigere, "to bring back into our power what has been lost" — which situates recuperare in its civilian theoretical context. Burrill's entry then trails off mid-sentence into material on RECUSATIO TESTIS, a typographical artifact of dictionary formatting that has no substantive connection to RECUPERARE.
Neither dictionary addresses the procedural history of Latin judgment formulas in English courts or the 1731 statutory reform abolishing Latin records. Researchers should not rely on these entries for that history; they function only as definitional anchors.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: JUDGMENT (COMMON LAW FORMS); RECOVERY; LATIN PLEADING AND RECORD LANGUAGE