Definition
A Latin adverb used in legal writing to mean "regularly," "as a general rule," or "according to rule." The term signals a default legal principle — one that holds in ordinary circumstances but may yield to exceptions. In medieval and early modern legal texts, regulariter introduces a proposition that is presumptively true or operative, while leaving open the possibility that special circumstances, equity, or contrary authority might displace it.
The phrase functions as a qualifier of scope rather than an absolute statement. A writer invoking regulariter acknowledges that the rule stated is the standard case, not an inviolable command.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Bracton, Coke, or related medieval and early modern English legal sources will encounter regulariter frequently as a term of art signaling the structure of legal argument. Its presence is a flag: the passage is stating a general rule, and the reader should look nearby — or elsewhere in the same treatise — for the exceptions. Missing this qualifier can lead a researcher to overstate a rule's reach, treating a presumptive principle as an absolute one.
The term appears most often in Latin-language legal treatises and Year Books. It does not carry over meaningfully into modern common law practice, where phrases like "as a general rule," "ordinarily," or "absent contrary circumstances" perform the same function in plain English. When a researcher encounters regulariter in a secondary source or historical quotation without translation, it is a reliable signal that the surrounding proposition is being softened, not hardened.
Corpus connections: Burrill records two characteristic uses. The first, drawn from Bracton (fol. 87b), shows regulariter operating as a structural marker in Bracton's systematic exposition of English law — a technique Bracton inherited from Roman and canon law methodology, where general rules were regularly distinguished from their exceptions. The second, drawn from Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 223), applies the term to a specific rule of property law: regulariter non valet pactum de re mea non alienanda — as a general rule, an agreement not to alienate one's own property is void. The Coke usage is important because it shows regulariter surviving into the seventeenth century as learned legal Latin even in a common law context.
Researchers approaching historical property law sources should be aware that the restraint-on-alienation doctrine introduced by the Coke passage remains substantively significant in modern property law, even as regulariter itself has dropped out of use. The underlying rule — that agreements restricting alienation of property are generally unenforceable — continues in modified form across common law jurisdictions. The Latin wrapper has changed; the doctrine has not entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's is the primary shelf source for this term, and its treatment is brief but precise. Burrill correctly identifies regulariter as Latin used in old English law and correctly glosses it as "regularly; strictly; according to rule; as a general rule." The dual meaning he acknowledges — both "regularly" and "as a general rule" — captures a genuine ambiguity in the term's use. In some passages regulariter means that a procedure is being done in the proper, rule-conforming way (closer to "properly" or "in due form"). In others it introduces a general proposition as the default case. Context determines which sense is operative.
Burrill supports both glosses with primary source authority: Bracton and Coke on Littleton. These are the two most important sources one would expect for a term of this vintage, and the citations are genuine and traceable. No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus include this term, which is unsurprising given its narrow scope as a Latin qualifier rather than a substantive legal concept. The term does not appear to have generated dedicated treatment in Black's or Bouvier's at the editions surveyed.
What historical sources do not address is the methodological origin of regulariter as a technique. Its use in Bracton reflects the influence of Romanist and canonist legal science, where distinguishing regulae (general rules) from their exceptions was a standard mode of exposition. Researchers interested in the intellectual history of English common law will find regulariter a useful marker of continental learned law influence.