Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "on all sides" or "from every quarter." In legal usage, the term appears in the phrase undique collatis membris — "members being collected from every quarter" — applied to a contract assembled or compounded from elements drawn from multiple distinct contracts. The term describes not a type of contract per se, but a characteristic of composite agreements whose terms, obligations, or structures are drawn together from different contractual sources rather than arising from a single, unified agreement.
Common Confusion
Undique collatis membris should not be confused with the broader civil law concept of mixed contracts (contractus innominati or contracts of combined type), though the concepts are related. Undique collatis membris describes the structural origin of a contract's terms — drawn from multiple sources — whereas mixed contract doctrine in civil law tradition addresses the legal classification and governing rules for contracts that combine elements of nominate contract types. The former is a descriptive characterization; the latter is a classificatory and normative category.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter undique almost exclusively in older treatises and early American and English equity opinions dealing with contract construction. The term is a marker of a particular analytical move: courts and commentators identifying a contract as composite in nature in order to interpret ambiguous provisions by reference to the various source contracts from which its terms were assembled. Recognizing the phrase is important for understanding how nineteenth-century courts approached hybrid or mixed contracts — a question that remains analytically alive today under modern contract law, though the Latin terminology has dropped away entirely.
The phrase undique collatis membris is the operative unit; undique alone rarely appears in isolation in legal texts. Researchers searching historical digests or reporters should search the full phrase rather than the single word.
The Burrill citation to Curtis R. 350 references the reports of Justice Benjamin Curtis, a significant figure in early American federal jurisprudence. Researchers working in federal equity or admiralty sources from the mid-nineteenth century may find undique-related analysis clustered in that corpus, reflecting the influence of civil law and mixed legal traditions on American admiralty and commercial law of the period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources and defines the term concisely: "On all sides; from every quarter," with the operative legal phrase undique collatis membris applied to a contract "compounded of different contracts." Burrill does not elaborate on the legal consequences of this characterization, treating the term as descriptive rather than doctrinal. The single citation to Curtis R. 350 suggests the term had limited but real currency in mid-nineteenth-century American federal courts.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's early editions or Bouvier — appear to carry a dedicated entry for undique, which suggests the term occupied a narrow technical register even at the height of Latin legal usage. Researchers should not expect broad treatment across the historical dictionary shelf.