Definition
A common law plea available to an heir who is sued for a deceased ancestor's debts. By pleading riens per discent, the heir asserts that nothing came to him by descent from the ancestor — that is, no land and no assets passed to him through inheritance — and therefore he has nothing out of which the creditor's claim can be satisfied.
The doctrine reflects a foundational principle of common law succession: an heir's liability for an ancestor's debts was limited to the assets actually received by inheritance. An heir was not personally liable out of his own pre-existing estate; his exposure was bounded by what descended to him. If nothing descended, the plea was a complete defense.
Common Confusion
Riens per discent should not be confused with a general denial or a plea of no assets (plene administravit), which belongs to executors and administrators in probate contexts. Riens per discent is specifically the heir's plea, grounded in the law of descent rather than in the administration of an estate. The executor pleads that the estate has been fully administered; the heir pleads that nothing ever reached him through the line of descent.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in older common law pleading materials and reports. Researchers encountering it in pre-nineteenth-century English or American cases should understand they are in the technical vocabulary of common law debt actions against heirs — a procedural world largely displaced by modern probate and creditors' rights statutes.
The practical importance of the plea has essentially vanished. Modern law generally channels creditor claims against a decedent's estate through probate administration rather than direct actions against heirs. Where such actions survive in modified form, they are governed by statute, not common law pleading rules, and the old Norman-French formula is nowhere to be found in modern practice.
The primary research trap is treating this as a substantive defense rather than a formal pleading. In the sources that cite it, the plea's significance lay in its procedural function: it forced the creditor to prove that assets did in fact descend, shifting the burden within the structure of common law debt actions. Researchers reading early reports must attend to how the plea interacted with the forms of action — particularly debt — rather than importing modern concepts of the burden of proof in civil litigation.
Cross-jurisdictional research presents an additional complication. American courts inherited the plea from English practice but applied it unevenly as common law pleading reformed across states in the nineteenth century. By the time of the Field Code reforms and their progeny, the term had largely disappeared from American practice, though it persisted longer in jurisdictions slow to reform common law pleading.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries are substantively identical, both grounding the plea in Crooke's King's Bench reports (Cro. Car. 151) and Tidd's Practice. Burrill preserves the Law French etymology more explicitly — "thing by discent" — which clarifies the grammatical structure of the phrase: riens (nothing/no thing), per (by), discent (descent). Black's renders it as "nothing by descent" without pausing on the word-by-word construction.
Neither dictionary adds significant doctrinal elaboration beyond the bare definition. Both are content to locate the plea within the narrow fact pattern of a creditor suing an heir. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural mechanism by which the plea operated — how it was traversed, what evidence was required to defeat it, or how it interacted with the writ of debt. For that, Tidd's Practice (the treatise both sources cite) remains the appropriate reference.
Jurisdictional Note
The plea originated in English common law and was received into American practice in the colonial and early national periods. As American states adopted code pleading through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the technical plea form became obsolete. No modern American jurisdiction employs riens per discent as a formal pleading.