Definition
A tice, in English common law and older legal usage, refers to a form of enticement or lure — an inducement used to draw a person, animal, or party into a position, transaction, or circumstance against their interest or without full awareness of the consequence. The term appears primarily in archaic legal writing and is closely related to the concept of entrapment or decoy.
The historical dictionaries consulted do not yield a clean, unified legal definition for this term as a standalone entry. The source material retrieved under this headword appears to reflect either misfiled entries or fragmentary cross-references within larger dictionary compilations, and researchers should treat any isolated appearance of "tice" in a legal source as likely a shortened or dialectal form of "entice" rather than a term of independent legal art.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In cricket, a tice is a ball bowled to land about a bat's length in front of the wicket — a yorker — or more broadly, a ball positioned to tempt the opposing batsman into a difficult or mistaken stroke.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To entice. [Obs.]"
The gap between common and legal meaning here is narrow but worth noting. Both the common and legal senses share the same core idea: a deliberate lure designed to induce another party to act in a way that serves the interests of the one doing the luring. The legal application extends this concept into fraud, agency, and liability for induced conduct, while the cricketing sense preserves the sporting metaphor of temptation and strategic misdirection. The Webster's notation of obsolescence is important — by the nineteenth century, "tice" had largely been absorbed into the more formal term "entice," which carries the same root and meaning.
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Common Confusion
TICE / ENTICE: These terms share a common derivation and the same operational meaning. "Tice" is the clipped or dialectal form; "entice" is the standard legal term that survived into modern usage. Researchers encountering "tice" in older English legal records, colonial American documents, or ecclesiastical proceedings should treat it as functionally equivalent to "entice" and search under that headword for applicable doctrine. Using "tice" as a standalone search term in primary source databases will yield sparse and often unrelated results.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will rarely encounter "tice" as a defined legal term in American materials. Its significance is almost entirely as a historical linguistic artifact in English sources, particularly pre-nineteenth century records. Several practical cautions apply:
First, the fragmentary nature of the historical dictionary entries retrieved for this term — including what appear to be stray paragraphs about judicial immunity and lopwood rights — suggests that "tice" may appear as a printing artifact, abbreviated cross-reference, or scanning error in digitized legal dictionaries. When encountered in a digitized corpus, verify the surrounding context before treating it as a defined term.
Second, in older English equity and common law pleadings, "tice" or "ticing" may appear in allegations of fraudulent inducement or conspiracy, particularly in cases involving livestock, servants, or apprentices being lured away from their lawful employers. The underlying doctrine in those cases is enticement, not a discrete body of "tice" law.
Third, the cricketing sense of the term is entirely irrelevant to legal research but may create false positives in keyword searches across general historical databases that blend legal and non-legal text.
For any substantive research into the legal doctrine of inducement or enticement — including tortious interference with employment, entrapment, fraud in the inducement, or seduction of servants — researchers should proceed directly to the headword ENTICE and its associated doctrinal entries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionary sources consulted (Black's Law Dictionary; Rapalje & Lawrence) do not contain a substantive entry for "tice" as an independent term of legal art. The fragments retrieved under this headword appear to be misallocated content: one passage concerns judicial immunity for acts within jurisdiction (a standard topic appearing under headwords like JUDGE or JUDICIAL IMMUNITY), and another concerns lopwood rights in English manorial law. Neither bears on any doctrine cognate to "tice."
Black's brief notation — "associations of a limited number of persons" — does not correspond to any recognizable definition of this term and may reflect an indexing or retrieval anomaly.
The Webster's 1913 entry, while brief, is the most useful source here: it confirms that "tice" was recognized as a verb meaning to entice, marked as obsolete by the late nineteenth century. This is consistent with the term's trajectory — absorbed into standard legal English as "entice" and effectively retired as a standalone form.
No historical legal dictionary reviewed treats "tice" as generating independent legal consequences distinct from enticement.
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Jurisdictional Note
No jurisdiction in the United States has codified "tice" as a distinct legal term. English historical usage is the only context in which the term appears with any legal coloring, and even there it functioned as informal shorthand rather than technical vocabulary.
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