Definition
A Latin adverb from Roman civil law meaning "rashly," "inconsiderately," or "without sufficient cause." In legal usage, *temere* does not function as a standalone term but almost exclusively as part of the phrase *temere litigare* — to litigate rashly. A plaintiff was said to *temere litigare* who brought a claim out of malice, without just cause, or who could demonstrate no cognizable ground of action. The concept captured the civil law's concern with abuse of process and the burden imposed on defendants by baseless suits.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a current English word; functions in English contexts only as a borrowed Latin term, occasionally used in scholarly or ecclesiastical writing to mean "rashly" or "without forethought."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; would have been recognizable to classically educated readers as the Latin adverb for "rashly" or "by chance."
The gap here is directional rather than semantic. In common or classical Latin, *temere* could carry a broad range of meanings from mere carelessness to blind chance. In legal usage, it narrowed sharply to describe a specific species of procedural bad faith — not mere recklessness, but the deliberate or malicious prosecution of a claim without any actionable foundation.
Common Confusion
*Temere* is sometimes loosely associated with the broader concept of *calumnia* (malicious litigation) in civil law sources. The distinction matters: *calumnia* typically implied knowing falsity and carried more severe consequences, while *temere litigare* encompassed a wider range of groundless suits, including those brought from ignorance or indifference to legal merit as well as from malice. Researchers should not treat the terms as interchangeable when working with Roman or early civil law texts.
Why It Matters in Research
*Temere* is a narrow, context-dependent term that will appear in Law Mind sources almost exclusively in two situations: discussions of Roman civil procedure and its influence on later civil law traditions, and comparative treatments of frivolous litigation or malicious prosecution doctrines.
Researchers tracing the history of sanctions for baseless litigation — including modern analogues like Rule 11 sanctions, vexatious litigant statutes, or abuse of process doctrine — may encounter *temere* in foundational civil law sources as an early expression of the same underlying concern. The term signals a civilian rather than common law lineage, so its presence in a text is itself an indicator of civil law influence or civilian scholarly method.
Because *temere* rarely appears without the companion word *litigare*, full-text searches should use the phrase *temere litigare* rather than the adverb alone to avoid false positives from classical or ecclesiastical texts where the word carries its non-legal meaning.
The citation to Brissonius (Barnabé Brisson, *De Verborum Significatione*, a late 16th-century civil law lexicon) in both Black's and Burrill's is a useful provenance marker. When this citation appears in secondary sources, it indicates the author is drawing on the learned civil law tradition rather than reporting a working common law doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (2nd Ed.) and Burrill's are in near-complete agreement, with Burrill adding the phrase "without sufficient cause" to round out the definition. Neither entry develops the procedural consequences of being found to have litigated *temere* — such as the possibility of a penalty action or cost-shifting — which were live issues in Roman procedure. Both entries cite Brissonius as authority, reflecting the standard 19th-century American practice of tracing civil law terms back to the Renaissance civilian lexicographers rather than to the Digest or Code directly.
What the historical dictionaries miss: neither source explains how *temere litigare* fit within the Roman procedural system of penalties for failed claims, nor do they connect the concept to its partial analogues in equity practice or early common law. Researchers needing that fuller picture should look beyond the dictionary entries to treatises on Roman civil procedure and comparative litigation abuse scholarship.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Malicious Prosecution; Abuse of Process; Frivolous Litigation (Historical).