Definition
"Torial" does not appear to be a recognized legal term. The source material supplied under this heading is a fragment from Rapalje & Lawrence's legal dictionary describing classifications of private waters — a passage that has been misattributed or mislabeled in the source index. The text concerns riparian and navigable water law, not a term called "torial."
No entry for "torial" appears in standard legal dictionaries, including Black's Law Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Rapalje & Lawrence's own complete published work. No recognized legal doctrine, term of art, pleading form, or common-law concept carries this name.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "torial" in a Law Mind corpus search should treat it as a likely indexing artifact or OCR error rather than a genuine legal term. Several possibilities warrant investigation:
First, "torial" may be a truncated form of a longer word. Candidates include "armatorial" (relating to armorial bearings), "dictatorial," "equatorial," "prætorial" or "prætorian" (relating to the Roman praetor or praetorian authority), "senatorial," or "territorial" — all of which carry legal significance and appear in historical legal literature. OCR processing of historical texts frequently clips prefixes and word-beginnings when column edges, damaged pages, or tight bindings obscure the left margin.
Second, the source material actually present under this heading concerns private waters and navigable waterways — a topic governed by riparian rights doctrine in English and American law. If a researcher arrived here seeking that subject matter, the relevant terms are RIPARIAN RIGHTS, NAVIGABLE WATERS, PRIVATE WATERS, and WATERCOURSE.
Third, if the intended term was TERRITORIAL — as in territorial jurisdiction, territorial waters, or territorial application of law — that is a substantive legal concept with significant historical development in both English and American law, and researchers should search under that heading directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
The Rapalje & Lawrence passage provided is genuine but misplaced. It reads as part of a numbered series on classifications of private waters (the fragment begins mid-sentence at point "23. Private waters navigable by public") and cites legitimate historical sources: Phear on Waters, Gale on Easements, Dart on Vendors and Purchasers, and several English appellate decisions including Orr Ewing v. Colquhoun (2 App. Cas. 854) and Mackenzie v. Bankes (3 App. Cas. 1324). These are real authorities in English water law. The passage belongs under a water law heading — most likely WATERS, PRIVATE or NAVIGABLE WATERS — not under any term resembling "torial."
Historical dictionaries do not support the existence of "torial" as a standalone legal term. Rapalje & Lawrence's dictionary, published in 1883, contains no entry under this heading in the published text. The fragment here is either a database indexing error or the product of corrupted source tagging.