Definition
"Tals" is the plural form of "tal," a term appearing in older legal and ecclesiastical usage, most commonly encountered in compound Latin phrases within canon law and civil law scholarship. In isolation, the term carries no independent legal definition in English common law or modern statutory systems. Its significance in legal research is almost entirely derivative — it surfaces in bibliographic and citation contexts relating to historical sources, particularly medieval and ecclesiastical legal collections.
In the specific context of Bouvier's citation to the Decretales Gregorii Noni, the abbreviation "X" (standing for "extra," meaning outside or beyond the Decretum of Gratian) is used in canonical citation practice, not "tals" itself. The term "tals" as a discrete legal word is thus rarely the subject of substantive legal definition; researchers encounter it primarily as a grammatical or philological artifact within older digests and glossaries.
Common Confusion
"Tals" should not be confused with "tales," a legitimate common law and procedural term referring to bystanders called to complete a jury panel when the original venire is exhausted (from the Latin "tales de circumstantibus"). The two words are visually and phonologically close enough to generate transcription and search errors in historical documents, particularly in handwritten court records where terminal letters are ambiguous. A researcher who encounters what appears to be "tals" in a jury-related document should first consider whether the intended word is "tales" before treating it as a distinct term.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus who encounter "tals" are almost certainly working in one of two contexts: (1) canon law and ecclesiastical legal materials, where Latin plurals appear frequently in untranslated or partially translated citations, or (2) early civil law treatises that import Continental terminology without anglicizing it.
The principal research trap here is treating "tals" as a term of art with substantive legal content when it functions grammatically — as a plural demonstrative or descriptive form — rather than doctrinally. Historical legal dictionaries, including Bouvier's, do not define "tals" as a standalone entry. Its appearance in source material is more likely a signal that the surrounding text is drawn from a Latin or ecclesiastical source tradition than that the word itself carries operational legal weight.
If the word appears in a manuscript or digest as part of a phrase such as "talis" or "talibus" (dative/ablative forms of the Latin "talis," meaning "such" or "of such a kind"), the researcher should treat it as part of a Latin construction requiring translation, not as an English legal term. This distinction matters when indexing or searching historical corpora — keyword searches on "tals" will surface both genuine Latin phrases and anglicized forms inconsistently, depending on how a transcriber handled the original text.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary does not contain a standalone entry for "tals." The only source material provided in connection with this term is the entry for Decretales Gregorii Noni, which concerns the papal decretals of Gregory IX compiled in 1227. That entry explains the structural organization of the collection and its standard citation form using the abbreviation "X" (extra). The connection to "tals" is indirect at best — the Bouvier entry does not use the word "tals" substantively.
No other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's, Burrill's, or Tomlin's — has been identified as defining "tals" as an independent legal term. This absence is itself informative: the word did not achieve the threshold of recognized legal vocabulary in English legal lexicography.