Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning "to draw" or "to pull toward." In legal usage, trahere appears almost exclusively in the context of the maxim that a greater or principal thing draws to itself that which is lesser or incidental — the doctrine that incidents follow their principal. The term is not a standalone legal concept but a verb embedded in doctrinal maxims governing how legal consequences attach when two things stand in a principal-incident relationship.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering trahere in historical sources will almost always find it embedded in a maxim rather than used as a freestanding term. The key phrase to recognize is the Bracton formulation: Id quod majus est trahit ad se id quod minus est — "that which is greater draws to it that which is less." This maxim appears in property, inheritance, and jurisdictional contexts throughout medieval and early modern English law.
The practical trap: trahere and its derivatives (trahit, trahi, tractum) appear in sources spanning civil law, canon law, and old English common law. A researcher who finds trahit or trahitur in a text may be encountering a variant of the same root applied in a different doctrinal context — particularly in civil procedure discussions about whether a person or matter can be "drawn" before a particular court or tribunal. Confusion between the property-law sense (incidents following principals) and the jurisdictional sense (compelling appearance before a forum) is easy to make.
The Burrill entry also gestures toward a Scottish legal usage — traistis — which is etymologically and functionally distinct, relating to trust and faith placed in court clerks for purposes of attachment. Do not conflate the two. The fragment in Burrill appears to have been incompletely typeset or excerpted, and the Scottish procedural context it references belongs to a separate legal tradition.
In the Law Mind corpus, trahere is most likely to surface in:
- Treatise discussions of the principal-incident doctrine in real property
- Maxim collections derived from Bracton or Coke
- Civil law glossaries where Latin procedural vocabulary is catalogued
- Scottish law materials discussing court procedure (via the traistis usage)
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry: trahere as "to draw," illustrated by the Bracton maxim at folio 175, and followed by what appears to be a fragment of a Scottish legal text referencing traistis. The two usages share a Latin root but belong to entirely different legal contexts, and Burrill's placement of the Scottish fragment immediately after the Bracton maxim is potentially misleading.
Burrill does not address the civil law background of trahere, though the maxim itself has deep roots in Roman legal reasoning about accession and the relationship between principal and accessory — concepts developed in Justinian's Digest and carried into medieval jurisprudence. Researchers seeking the full doctrinal lineage of the principal-incident maxim will need to go beyond Burrill to civilian sources or to Bracton directly.
No other Law Mind shelf source provides an independent entry for trahere. The term is sufficiently archaic and Latin-specific that it does not appear in later English-language legal dictionaries as a headword; later works absorb the concept under PRINCIPAL AND INCIDENT, ACCESSORY, or relevant maxim collections.
Jurisdictional Note
The principal-incident maxim drawn from trahere is a feature of common law reasoning with roots in both English and civilian tradition. The Scottish usage visible in the Burrill fragment reflects Scots law procedure and should not be read into English or American authorities.