Definition
Latin term meaning will, volition, intention, or purpose. In legal usage, voluntas carries two distinct applications:
1. Mental element / criminal and civil intent: The internal act of willing — the purpose or design that animates a legal act. In this sense, voluntas refers to the mental state that precedes and directs conduct, closely aligned with what modern law calls mens rea or animus. The maxim crimen non contrahitur, nisi voluntas nocendi intercedat captures this usage: crime is not contracted unless the intention to do harm is present.
2. Testamentary will: In old English law, voluntas was used as a synonym for a decedent's last will and testament, though testamentum was the more technically precise term. This usage appears in medieval and early modern sources and is largely archaic by the modern period.
The two meanings are contextually distinct but share a common root: both express the primacy of human willing as a legally operative fact.
Common Confusion
Voluntas and animus both translate roughly as "intention" and appear in overlapping maxims, but they are not interchangeable. Animus tends to denote the specific mental attitude accompanying a particular act (animus revertendi, animus possidendi), while voluntas denotes the broader faculty of will or the generalized impulse to act. Voluntas is also sometimes conflated with mens rea in modern paraphrase, but voluntas is a civil-law and common-law maxim term, not a technical synonym for mens rea, which is a common-law doctrine with its own formal elements. Researchers should not assume that a source's use of voluntas maps cleanly onto a modern mens rea analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of voluntas is a genuine trap for researchers working across time periods. A source that refers to the voluntas of a decedent may be discussing a testamentary document, not an inquiry into intent — context and era determine which meaning applies. Pre-18th-century English legal texts, particularly those influenced by Bracton and the civilian tradition, are the most likely sites of ambiguity.
For criminal law research, voluntas appears in Latin maxims embedded in treatises and early case reports. Researchers tracing the historical roots of mens rea will encounter voluntas as a foundational concept in Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, where the will to harm is treated as constitutive of criminal liability. The maxim voluntas et propositum distinguunt maleficia — will and purpose distinguish crimes — signals that early common law already differentiated offenses by mental state, a point relevant to historical arguments about the antiquity of intent-based criminal liability.
In the testamentary sense, voluntas appears in conveyancing and probate sources. The maxim voluntas donatoris in charta doni sui manifeste expressa observetur (the will of the donor as plainly expressed in his charter of gift shall be observed) is cited in Coke on Littleton and remains relevant to interpretation of historical grants and deeds of gift. Researchers working with early land records or charitable trust history should be alert to this formulation.
Voluntas is also a lens into the civilian influence on English law. Its frequency in Bracton, Fleta, and related texts reflects the integration of Roman law concepts into early common law doctrine. Researchers tracing that reception history will find voluntas serving as a connective term between Roman sources and their English adaptation.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning — will, intention, volition, purpose — and all recognize the dual application to mental state and testamentary document, though they weight these differently.
Black's gives the testamentary usage notable prominence and flags the more proper term (testamentum), which is useful guidance for researchers who encounter the term in probate contexts. Black's also quotes the donatoris maxim from Coke, anchoring the term in a real treatise tradition.
Burrill provides the richest treatment of the intent-as-criminal-element dimension, quoting two Bracton maxims with folio citations. The maxim voluntas et propositum distinguunt maleficia is particularly instructive: it shows that voluntas was not merely a synonym for intention in the abstract but a technical marker of culpable mental state in criminal doctrine. Burrill's folio references to Bracton (fol. 2b, 136b) and Fleta (lib. 1, c. 31, § 4) are navigational aids for researchers working in those primary sources.
Anderson is the most compressed of the three, but contributes the maxim stat pro ratione voluntas (the will stands for the reason) with a gloss specific to testamentary law: that a testamentary disposition needs no external justification beyond the testator's expressed will. This is a useful counterpoint to the criminal-intent usage and underscores that voluntas, in the probate context, was a term of legal sufficiency, not merely description.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any treatment of voluntas in the context of contract formation or civil obligation, where the concept of will was equally operative in the civilian tradition. Researchers working in equity or conflict-of-laws history may need to look beyond these dictionary entries for that dimension.
Jurisdictional Note
Voluntas is a Latin maxim term, not a statutory or code term, and does not vary by jurisdiction in the way a modern legal standard would. However, its weight and frequency differ between common-law and civil-law jurisdictions. In Louisiana and Quebec, and in comparative law research drawing on Roman or canon law sources, voluntas appears more regularly as a structural concept. Common-law researchers are most likely to encounter it in historical sources, maxim collections, and treatises rather than in modern opinions.