Definition
A Latin maxim of old English legal procedure meaning "to cure" or "to heal." In its procedural context, sanare referred to the act of remedying or correcting a defect, default, or irregularity in a legal proceeding — most commonly, a party's failure to appear or respond within the required time. The term appears in formulaic legal Latin of the medieval common law, typically in conditional clauses stating that a consequence would follow unless the defaulting party first cured (sanaverit) the defect.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering sanare in historical sources are almost certainly reading procedural Latin from medieval or early modern English legal texts — Fleta, Bracton, the Year Books, or their derivatives. The term does not survive into modern procedural vocabulary as a standalone term; its function has been absorbed into the modern concept of cure, waiver, and amendment of defects.
The principal trap is translating sanare too literally as a medical metaphor and missing its precise procedural force: it is not merely healing in a general sense but the specific act of rectifying a named default so that the proceeding may continue. The condition nisi defaltam sanaverit — unless he cure the default — was a standard escape valve in pleading practice, preserving a party's ability to correct a misstep before suffering the full consequence of default.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus who encounter sanare should look laterally to related procedural doctrine: the mechanics of default, the conditions under which courts permitted parties to remedy procedural failures, and the eventual codification of amendment and cure rules in equity and later in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The term itself is a marker of Latin-formula pleading practice and will typically appear only in pre-eighteenth-century sources or in scholarly commentary on that period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the principal English-language legal dictionary source for sanare, defining it simply as "to cure" and placing it in old practice. The single illustrative quotation — nisi defaltam sanaverit, drawn from Fleta, lib. 2, c. 7, § 13 — is compact but genuinely instructive. Fleta, composed circa 1290, was a systematic Latin treatise on English law closely modeled on Bracton, and the passage Burrill cites concerns procedural defaults in the context of pleading obligations. The conditional formula sanaverit (third person singular perfect subjunctive of sanare) is characteristic of the subjunctive-heavy conditional clauses that governed medieval procedural Latin.
Burrill does not elaborate on the broader doctrine surrounding cure of defaults, nor does he trace sanare through later practice. Other major historical dictionaries — Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Black's early editions — do not appear to carry a standalone entry for the term, reflecting its status as a piece of working procedural Latin rather than a substantive legal concept requiring extended definition. The absence of the term from later dictionaries tracks the decline of Latin pleading in English courts following the Pleading in English Act 1362 and more decisively after the formal abolition of law Latin in English legal proceedings in the eighteenth century.