Definition
Tates is an archaic term of art in real property law referring to a form of alienation by which a tenant in tail, or a tenant seised in another's right, conveys or suffers a conveyance of an estate in such a manner that those with a future interest — including issue in tail, heirs, successors, or persons in reversion or remainder — are deprived of the right of entry and must instead pursue a formal legal action to recover the estate. In practical terms, a tates was a wrongful or irregular alienation that extinguished the right of self-help (entry) and substituted a remedy only by suit.
The concept is closely bound to discontinuance: tates describes the act or fact of the alienation itself, while discontinuance describes its legal consequence — the interruption of the right of entry for those whose freehold was displaced. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably in historical sources, but the distinction is functional. Tates names the transaction; discontinuance names the legal effect.
Common Confusion
Tates and discontinuance are easily conflated because historical sources often treat them as synonyms. Bouvier uses tates specifically to mark the alienation event, reserving discontinuance for the resulting procedural consequence — the foreclosure of the right of entry. Researchers should also avoid confusing this use of discontinuance with the modern procedural term (voluntary dismissal of an action), which is unrelated. See DISCONTINUANCE.
Why It Matters in Research
Tates is essentially a dead term. It appears in older English property law treatises and early American legal dictionaries derived from them, but it did not survive into modern common law usage. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical sources — colonial-era conveyancing records, early nineteenth-century American digests, and English real property texts predating the nineteenth-century property law reforms.
The term matters most as a pointer. When Bouvier or a contemporaneous source uses tates, the surrounding discussion almost always implicates the law of entailed estates, remainders, reversions, and the technical distinction between remedies by entry and remedies by action — distinctions that were practically significant in a system that had not yet abolished real actions. The collapse of the fee tail and the simplification of real property law in most American jurisdictions rendered the term obsolete well before the twentieth century.
Researchers working in historical deed records or early equity proceedings who encounter this term should treat it as a signal to examine the conveyancing chain closely. A tates in the record indicates that a future interest holder may have had a claim against the estate that could only be vindicated by action, not by mere entry — a distinction that affects how title was established and challenged in the period.
Be alert to variant spellings and to sources that absorb the concept entirely under discontinuance without naming the alienation separately.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the primary American source for this term, and its definition is brief: an alienation made or suffered by a tenant in tail, or another tenant seised in autre droit, by which future interest holders are driven to their action and cannot enter. Bouvier explicitly links tates to discontinuance and frames the distinction as procedural — entry versus action.
English sources in the Coke and Blackstone tradition develop the underlying doctrine more fully, though they do not always use "tates" as a standalone headword. The concept derives from the common law treatment of entailed estates and the constraints on alienation by tenants whose power to convey was limited by the nature of their seisin. Bouvier's entry reflects that tradition in condensed form.
No modern legal dictionary of significance carries this term. Its absence from post-nineteenth-century sources confirms that tates is a historical artifact rather than a living term of art.
Jurisdictional Note
Tates as a distinct legal concept has no operative significance in any current American jurisdiction. The abolition or severe limitation of fee tail estates across American states, combined with the elimination of the old real actions, removed the doctrinal foundation on which the term rested. It retains relevance only in historical legal research concerning jurisdictions and periods when entailed estates and the right of entry versus right of action distinction were operative.