Definition
In Roman law, veredes remotiores (also rendered as haeredes remotiores) denotes the more remote heirs — that is, those kindred who stand in a more distant degree of relationship to a decedent than the immediate lineal descendants. The term identifies collateral relatives and other kin who would take an inheritance only in the absence of closer heirs, particularly children and direct descendants.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with Roman inheritance law and its reception into early English and civil law scholarship. Researchers encountering it in historical legal texts should understand that it functions as a term of classification, not a term of action — it tells you where a claimant sits in the order of succession, not what procedural steps governed their claim.
The principal trap in historical sources is contextual bleed: Black's entry for veredes remotiores runs directly into the adjacent entries for haeredes sui et necessarii and haeredum appellatione in the original text, and early transcriptions sometimes merge or mislabel these entries. When citing Black's for this term, verify that the passage you are reading is actually the veredes remotiores entry and not the continuation of a neighboring one.
Because this is a Latin term of art from Roman civil law, researchers using it in a common law corpus context should treat it primarily as a term encountered in treatises, glossaries, and academic writing rather than in case reporters or statutes. Its practical significance in English legal history lies in the background it provides for understanding how inheritance priority rules were structured before and alongside the development of English rules of descent.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines veredes remotiores as "more remote heirs" and specifies that the term covers "kinsmen other than children or descendants." This is the core meaning — the phrase is essentially a Latin shorthand for the residual class of heirs left after the preferred class of lineal descendants (haeredes sui) is exhausted or absent.
Historical sources do not develop the term much beyond this classificatory function. The Roman law framework distinguished sharply between haeredes sui et necessarii (own and necessary heirs — lineal descendants who inherited automatically and could not refuse) and the more remote kin who stood further back in the order. Veredes remotiores describes that further-back class by contrast to the preferred class rather than by its own positive definition.
What historical dictionaries largely omit is any treatment of how this classification interacted with the praetorian system of bonorum possessio, which could modify the strict civil law order of succession and give certain remote heirs standing they might not have had under the older ius civile. Researchers needing to understand the full operational context of this term in Roman succession should look beyond the dictionary entry to treatise literature on Roman private law.
Jurisdictional Note
Veredes remotiores is a term of Roman civil law with no direct operative meaning in modern common law jurisdictions. It may appear in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed civil law jurisdictions in historical succession materials, but even there it functions as a historical reference point rather than a living term of art.