Definition
In Scots law, substitutes in an entail are the heirs designated in a deed of entail to take the property in succession upon the failure of prior heirs. The process of enumerating or designating those heirs — specifying the order and conditions of succession — is called substitution. A substitute heir does not hold a vested right in the property; their claim depends entirely on the failure of those ranked ahead of them in the settlement.
Substitution in this context is a device of property law, not inheritance law in the ordinary intestate sense. The settlor (the granter of the entail) controls the line of succession through the deed itself, specifying who takes, in what order, and under what conditions.
Common Confusion
Substitution in entail should not be confused with substitution of parties in civil procedure, which involves replacing one litigant with another during litigation. Nor should it be confused with the general concept of a substitute bequest in testamentary law, where a testator names an alternate beneficiary in case the primary beneficiary predeceases the testator. The Scots entail context is narrower and more formalized: the substitute heirs are fixed in the deed, the succession is generally inalienable, and the rules governing who may be named and how the entail may be broken were governed by specific Scots statutory and common law.
Why It Matters in Research
Scots entail law is a largely extinct body of law, substantially dismantled by the Entail Amendment Acts of the nineteenth century and formally abolished by the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000. Researchers encountering references to substitutes in entail will almost exclusively find them in historical property records, trust deeds, and conveyancing instruments from roughly the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries.
Two research traps are common. First, the terminology of Scots entail law — substitute, institute, heir of entail, heirs-substitute — does not map cleanly onto English property law vocabulary. An "institute" is the primary heir named in the entail; the "substitutes" follow. English equivalents are imprecise. Second, Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) and similar American reference works treat Scots entail only cursorily, as a foreign curiosity. Researchers needing depth should look to Scots-specific sources: Bell's Principles of the Law of Scotland, Erskine's Institute, and the institutional writers generally.
The truncated and apparently corrupted source heading ("SUBV ASSORES") is itself a research caution: historical legal dictionaries in digitized form frequently contain OCR errors that obscure or mangle headwords, particularly for Scots and Latin terms. A researcher encountering an unfamiliar or nonsensical headword in a digitized source should check the surrounding context and cross-reference against the print edition before concluding the term is genuine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the concept briefly: "In Scotch law. The enumeration or designation of the heirs in a settlement of property. Substitutes in an entail are those heirs who are appointed in succession on failure of others." This is accurate as far as it goes but provides no procedural depth and no guidance on the statutory overlay that heavily regulated Scots entails. The entry trails off into the adjacent headwords SUBSTITUTIONAL and SUBSTITUTION, suggesting the original print entry was a short cross-reference rather than a standalone definition. No other source in the available corpus supplements this entry.
Jurisdictional Note
This concept is specific to Scots law and has no direct English or American equivalent. Researchers working in U.S. or English property law contexts will not encounter it as operative doctrine.