Definition
"Tence" is not an independent legal term. The entry appearing under this heading in Rapalje & Lawrence is a fragment — a typographical artifact produced by the truncation of the word SENTENCE (or a compound form such as FINAL SENTENCE) at a page or column break. The surviving text picks up mid-word at "-tence" and runs immediately into cross-references for FINAL SENTENCE, FINAL SETTLEMENT, and FINDING, confirming that no self-contained definition was ever assigned to "tence" as a standalone legal term.
Researchers who encounter this string in an index, table of contents, or digitized scan of Rapalje & Lawrence should treat it as a pointer to SENTENCE and its compound forms, not as a term of art in its own right.
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Common Confusion
The appearance of "tence" as a headword is a digitization and indexing artifact, not an archaic or jurisdictional variant of any legal concept. It should not be confused with:
- SENTENCE: the court's formal pronouncement of punishment or judgment.
- FINAL SENTENCE: a term used in admiralty and ecclesiastical practice, distinguished from interlocutory orders, and referenced in Rapalje & Lawrence at 1 Cranch (U.S.) 103.
- FINDING: a separate entry that immediately follows in the source text.
If a research tool has surfaced "tence" as a match, the underlying document almost certainly contains the word "sentence" and the fragment was captured in isolation.
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Why It Matters in Research
Digitized historical legal dictionaries — including 19th-century American compilations like Rapalje & Lawrence — were frequently typeset in double-column formats with entries running across page breaks. OCR processing and manual transcription both generate false headwords when a word is split across a line or column boundary. "Tence" is a characteristic example: the leading "sen-" was lost at a break, leaving the suffix to be indexed as if it were a complete term.
Researchers working with Law Mind's historical corpus should be alert to this class of artifact when:
1. A headword appears to have no definition of its own and leads directly into cross-references belonging to a neighboring substantive entry.
2. The headword is phonetically or orthographically a recognizable suffix of a common legal term.
3. The surrounding entries (here, FINAL SENTENCE and FINDING) suggest an alphabetical sequence that the apparent headword disrupts.
The correct research path from this entry is: navigate to SENTENCE, then to FINAL SENTENCE, where Rapalje & Lawrence's substantive treatment — anchored to the admiralty and equity distinction drawn in 1 Cranch (U.S.) 103 — will be found.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (1883) is the sole source carrying this fragment. The text preserved under the "tence" heading is not a definition but a citation cluster: 1 Cranch (U.S.) 103 for the distinction between final and definitive sentence; 3 Paige (N.Y.) 189 and 3 Rawle (Pa.) 420 for final settlement; and English criminal law authorities (Stephen's Criminal Digest, R. v. Moore, R. v. Glyde, R. v. Thurborn) leading into the FINDING entry. None of these citations support "tence" as a term; they support SENTENCE and FINDING as neighboring entries in the original dictionary.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — not Black's, not Bouvier, not Wharton — carries "tence" as a headword, which further confirms its status as an artifact rather than a recognized legal term.
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