Definition
Res incorporales (Latin: "incorporeal things") is a term from Roman and civil law referring to things that cannot be physically touched — things that exist not as tangible objects but as legally recognized rights, relations, and claims. The category stands in direct contrast to res corporales (corporeal things), which are material objects capable of being perceived by the senses.
In classical Roman law as codified in Justinian's Institutes, res incorporales encompassed rights such as usufructs, servitudes, obligations, and inheritances — legal interests that can be held and enforced but have no physical substance. The concept is the civil law's way of answering the question: what kinds of things can a person legally own or assert a claim over, even if those things cannot be picked up, stored, or weighed?
Bouvier's formulation is especially instructive: res incorporales includes both fixed relations that give a person power over things (real rights, such as an easement) and claims against persons (personal rights, such as a debt). This dual character — rights in rem and rights in personam — means the category maps roughly onto what common law systems handle through property law, contract law, and equity, though not always with the same conceptual architecture.
Common Confusion
Res incorporales is sometimes loosely equated with intangible property in modern common law usage. The concepts overlap but are not identical. Intangible property is a modern functional category built around tax, commercial, and intellectual property law; res incorporales is a structural ontological category from Roman legal taxonomy. The former is about economic treatment; the latter is about the nature of legal rights as a class of things. Researchers should also be careful not to confuse this term with res incorporata, which refers to an incorporated body (a corporation), and has no meaningful relationship to res incorporales beyond sharing a Latin root.
Why It Matters in Research
This term rarely appears in American common law case law as an operative legal standard. It surfaces instead in legal education, treatise writing, and civil law scholarship — which means corpus researchers will encounter it most often in nineteenth-century American treatises attempting to rationalize common law property categories against a Roman law framework, and in civilian jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland) where this taxonomy has direct doctrinal life.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the term belongs to a layered taxonomy. Roman law organized the entire law of things (the law of res) into a branching structure: res in commercio vs. res extra commercium, and within the former, res corporales vs. res incorporales. If you are reading a historical source and encounter this term without that framework in view, the argument will be harder to follow than it needs to be.
Second, in civilian jurisdictions that inherited Roman taxonomy directly, courts and legislatures treat this distinction as operative law. In those contexts, whether a right qualifies as res incorporales affects how it is transferred, inherited, and encumbered. Common law researchers used to thinking about property through possession and title rather than through rights-as-things may underread the significance of the classification in a civilian source.
Third, the rise of intellectual property, digital assets, and financial instruments has generated renewed scholarly interest in the res incorporales framework as a potential conceptual foundation for understanding non-physical legal interests. Modern law review literature sometimes imports this Roman term into contemporary debates. Researchers should note that these modern uses are largely analogical and theoretical, not descriptive of positive law in most common law systems.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries align closely in substance, with Burrill's being the most precise. Burrill supplies the full Latin phrase from the Institutes — quae tangi non possunt (things which cannot be touched) — and also adds res quae intelliguntur (things which are perceived by the mind alone), a formulation that captures the epistemological point the Roman jurists were making: incorporeal things are real as legal objects even though they are apprehended through reason rather than sensation. Burrill also cross-references res corporales explicitly, which is the correct way to read this term — always against its counterpart.
Black's definition is functional but thin, omitting the relational dimension that Bouvier supplies. Bouvier's entry is the most analytically useful of the three: his framing of res incorporales as "fixed relations in which men stand to things or to other men" moves beyond the mere negation (not touchable) to a positive account of what these things are — structured jural relationships. That framing aligns well with later Hohfeldian analysis of rights and anticipates how modern jurisprudence conceives of legal relations.
None of the three historical dictionaries addresses the tension between this civil law taxonomy and the common law's treatment of incorporeal hereditaments — a separate but related concept that common law systems developed independently and which partially tracks res incorporales without being derived from it.
Jurisdictional Note
In Louisiana, Quebec, and other mixed or civil law jurisdictions, the res corporales/res incorporales distinction retains doctrinal force and appears in codified form. In common law jurisdictions, the concept is jurisprudential background rather than operative law, though the parallel category of incorporeal hereditaments (rights in land such as easements, profits, and advowsons) served a similar taxonomic function in English property law.