Definition
A Latin maxim meaning "according to the art" or "according to the trade, business, or science." Used in legal contexts to describe conduct, workmanship, or professional practice measured against the recognized standards of a particular craft, trade, or profession. When a legal obligation is assessed secundum artem, the question is whether it conforms to the accepted methods and standards of the relevant field — not merely whether it was well-intentioned or customary in a general sense.
The phrase appears most naturally in contexts involving professional or skilled performance: a physician who treats a patient secundum artem is held to the standards of medicine; a craftsman who produces work secundum artem is judged against the standards of the craft. It functions as a legal shorthand for the objective professional standard against which conduct is to be measured.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Artificially; skillfully; professionally.
Historical common usage: The phrase does not appear as a standalone entry in Webster's 1913, reflecting its status as learned Latin usage rather than naturalized English vocabulary.
Editorial note: Wiktionary's gloss of "artificially" captures one older sense of the Latin ars — meaning something made by human skill rather than nature — but this usage does not carry into legal contexts. In law, secundum artem is not about artifice; it is about conformity to professional standards. A researcher encountering the phrase in a legal source should not interpret it through the general English sense of "skillfully" alone, but rather as a reference to an objective, field-specific standard of practice.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will most often encounter this phrase in older English and American common law sources — particularly in contract, warranty, and professional liability contexts — where it served as a compressed statement of the standard of care or performance owed by a skilled party. It is not a term of art with a precise modern statutory equivalent; its force is doctrinal and evidentiary rather than definitional.
The phrase does significant work in implied warranty doctrine. Older treatises and cases analyzing contracts with artisans, surgeons, or tradespeople frequently use secundum artem to describe the implied obligation that work will be performed in accordance with professional norms — a precursor to what modern law addresses through negligence standards and implied warranties of workmanlike performance. Researchers tracing the history of professional liability or the implied warranty of workmanlike quality will find this phrase functioning as an ancestor concept.
Because the phrase appears primarily in pre-twentieth-century sources, corpus researchers should note that its frequency drops sharply in modern case law, replaced by plain-English standards of care formulations. Encountering it in a modern source is unusual and may signal either deliberate historical reference or scholarly writing.
Cross-corpus trap: Do not conflate this phrase with the broader Latin maxim secundum legem (according to the law) or secundum regulam (according to the rule). Each has a distinct domain of application. Secundum artem is specifically tethered to professional or craft standards, not legal norms generally.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines the phrase tersely as "according to the art, trade, business, or science," capturing the full range of professional fields to which it can apply. The entry does not develop the doctrinal implications.
Historical legal dictionaries reflect the phrase's role as a maxim rather than a defined term — it was assumed to be familiar to legally educated readers trained in Latin and relied upon as a reference point rather than a concept requiring extended analysis. This means the phrase carries more doctrinal weight in practice than dictionary entries alone suggest.
What historical sources miss: No standard legal dictionary traces the phrase's specific application in implied warranty or early professional liability doctrine. Researchers relying solely on dictionary entries will underestimate its significance in those areas. Treatise-level sources on warranty law and the law of bailments are more productive for understanding how secundum artem actually operated in legal argument.