Definition
"Tition" does not appear as a standalone legal term in the historical or modern legal lexicon. The entry in Anderson's Dictionary of Law reproduced under this heading is not a definition of "tition" — it is misattributed source material drawn from entries on "Right," "Rights," and related terms (jus privatum, bill of rights, right of way, vested right, rightful). The text fragment breaks off mid-sentence and does not define any term called "tition."
This is a null entry: no recognized legal term "tition" exists in English or American law as an independent term of art. The string "tition" appears only as a suffix in words such as petition, partition, deposition, and requisition — each of which carries its own legal meaning and warrants its own entry.
Common Confusion
"Tition" should not be confused with any of the following, each of which is a real and distinct legal term:
PETITION — a formal written request addressed to a court, legislature, or governmental authority.
PARTITION — the division of jointly held property among co-owners, either by agreement or by judicial action.
REQUISITION — a formal demand, typically by a governmental authority, for property or services.
Each of these terms has its own entry.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "tition" as an apparent headword in a digitized or indexed legal source should treat it as an indexing or OCR artifact. Optical character recognition errors, truncated headwords, and column-break misattributions are common in digitized versions of nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, including Anderson's. When a source fragment begins mid-definition or references unrelated concepts (as this one does, pivoting through jus privatum, reserved rights, bill of rights, right of way, and vested rights with no connective thread), the reliable inference is corrupted source data, not an obscure term.
If your research led you here through a keyword search or an index hit on "tition," consider the following corrective steps:
1. Identify the intended term. The suffix "-tition" appears in petition, partition, requisition, competition, and deposition. Return to the original source document and examine the full page or column context to recover the correct headword.
2. Check for OCR truncation. The leading syllable or syllables of the intended term may have been dropped. "Pe-tition," "par-tition," and "req-uisition" are among the most legally significant candidates.
3. Do not treat the Anderson's fragment reproduced here as a definition of any term. The source text is a continuous passage from Anderson's entries on rights-related concepts and was not authored as a definition of "tition."
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law (1889) does not contain an entry for "tition." The source material reproduced in the prompt is drawn from Anderson's entries on right, rights, jus, and related property and constitutional concepts. The fragment references jus privatum, reserved rights, the Bill of Rights, right of way, rightful, and vested rights — a cluster of entries that appears in the "R" section of Anderson's, not as a definition of any "-tition" term.
No other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's, Bouvier's, or Burrill's — carries an entry for "tition" as a standalone legal term.