Definition
Latin: "without children." A descriptive phrase used in civil law contexts to characterize a person who has no living children, or a condition, estate, or legal status defined by the absence of offspring. The phrase operates most commonly in succession and inheritance law, where the presence or absence of children determines how property passes, what rights vest, and which legal rules apply.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Roman law, civil law jurisdictions, or early American and colonial legal materials will encounter sine liberis most often in testamentary and intestate succession contexts. The phrase frequently appears in conditional bequests and substitutionary dispositions — arrangements where property passes one way if a person dies with children (cum liberis) and another way if that person dies without children (sine liberis). Understanding this contrast is essential for parsing the structure of civil law wills and fideicommissa.
The primary research trap is assuming that "children" in this phrase carries its modern legal meaning. Under Roman and early civil law sources, liberis could encompass a range of descendants depending on context, and the Digest passages Burrill cites — Dig. 50.16.148 and Dig. 50.17.187 — address precisely this interpretive question: what counts as a child for purposes of this construction. Researchers should not import modern statutory definitions of "child" or "issue" backward into civil law sources without first consulting those Digest passages and relevant civilian commentaries.
The phrase also appears in fee tail and entail equivalents in civil law systems, where an estate might be conditioned on the grantee dying sine liberis, triggering a remainder or reversion. In Louisiana, South Carolina, and other jurisdictions with significant civil law heritage, traces of these constructions may appear in older deeds and wills, and the Latin shorthand was sometimes carried directly into documents drafted in English-language practice.
Burrill's source note — pointing to the Digest — is a useful anchor. Any researcher who needs the authoritative civilian construction should go directly to Dig. 50.16 (the title De verborum significatione) and Dig. 50.17 (De diversis regulis juris antiqui), which are the Roman law titles devoted to interpretation of legal terms and maxims. These are the foundational texts for resolving ambiguity in the phrase's scope.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but correctly oriented. He identifies the phrase as Latin for "without children" and immediately flags that the civil law construction of the phrase requires attention to the Digest, citing two specific loci. This is sound guidance: the phrase's apparent simplicity conceals real interpretive depth in civilian sources, and Burrill's instinct to send the reader to primary Roman law materials rather than paraphrase them reflects the phrase's essentially technical character within civil law doctrine.
The fragment of unrelated text that appears in the source material alongside this entry (language about misrepresentation and concealment) is a scanning or compilation artifact from an adjacent Burrill entry and does not belong to sine liberis. Researchers should disregard it.
No other source dictionaries in the current corpus cover this term. The absence of entries in common law dictionaries such as Black's or Bouvier's reflects the phrase's predominantly civil law provenance — it is not a term of art in English common law, though it appears in legal documents wherever civil law influence is present.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Most relevant in Louisiana and other civil law or mixed jurisdictions where succession law draws on Roman and French civilian tradition. In common law jurisdictions, the equivalent concept is usually expressed through the phrase "dying without issue" or "without heirs of the body," and those terms carry their own interpretive histories distinct from the civilian sine liberis construction.
---