Definition
A Latin term meaning "removed" or "remote." In legal usage, *remotum* appears primarily as part of the maxim: *Id quod est magis remotum non trahit ad se quod est magis junctum, sed e contrario in omni casu* — "That which is more remote does not draw to itself that which is more near, but the reverse, in every case." The term does not function as a standalone doctrine but as a component of this principle of legal construction and property interpretation, establishing that proximity governs rather than distance: the nearer thing controls the more remote, not the other way around.
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Common Confusion
*Remotum* is not the same as the doctrine of remoteness of damage in tort law, which concerns whether harm was a foreseeable consequence of a defendant's act. The Latin term and the maxim from which it derives are instruments of textual and property construction — rules about how adjacent or embedded legal language, estates, or conditions relate to one another. Researchers encountering *remotum* in historical property or conveyancing sources should resist reading it through the lens of modern tort doctrine.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter *remotum* in historical treatises on real property, conveyancing, and the construction of legal instruments — particularly those working with English common law sources from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The maxim cited by Burrill traces to Littleton's *Tenures* and Coke's commentary, making it a feature of the classical common law of estates rather than of any modern statutory framework.
Several navigational cautions apply. First, the term almost never appears in isolation in corpus sources — it will appear as part of the Latin maxim or in close paraphrase. Searching for *remotum* alone will surface fewer results than searching the full maxim or its English translation. Second, while the principle the maxim expresses survives in modern rules of construction (courts still hold that specific provisions govern over general ones, and that adjacent text controls ambiguous language), modern sources do not use the Latin. The researcher tracing this principle forward must translate into contemporary vocabulary: ejusdem generis, the rule of proximate antecedents, or general rules of textual proximity in statutory interpretation.
Third, this maxim belongs to a family of Latin property and construction maxims that populate Coke, Littleton, and the digests derived from them. Researchers working in Burrill, Bouvier, or Black's historical editions will find cross-currents among these maxims that require care — *remotum* may appear in proximity to maxims about cy-pres construction, the rule in Shelley's Case, or the construction of remainder interests, all of which occupy overlapping territory in pre-modern property law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary treatment in the Law Mind corpus. The entry is characteristically lean: it supplies the Latin term, its English gloss, the maxim, and citation back to Littleton and Coke. This is representative of how Burrill handles Latin terms — as maxim-carriers rather than as doctrines to be independently analyzed.
What Burrill does not supply is any discussion of how courts applied the maxim in practice, or of its relationship to adjacent construction principles. The citation to Littleton section 164a and Coke's commentary thereon is the primary pathway for researchers needing deeper treatment; those sources address the principle in the context of estate construction and the reading of conveyancing language, where the question of which clause or condition governs another was practically significant.
No later standard dictionaries — Bouvier, Black's in its historical editions — appear to give *remotum* a standalone entry, treating it instead as subsumed within broader maxim collections. This is an area where historical dictionary coverage is genuinely thin, and researchers should move quickly from dictionary sources into the primary treatise literature.
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