Definition
Vulgo quaesiti (also rendered vulgo quaesitus in the singular) is a Latin term from Roman civil law meaning, literally, "sought from the crowd" or "gotten from the people." It refers to children born of promiscuous or indiscriminate cohabitation — that is, children whose paternity cannot be established because the mother had no fixed or identifiable partner at the time of conception. Such children were considered in Roman law to have no legally recognized father (pater incertus), and their legal status and inheritance rights were determined solely through the maternal line.
The term is functionally equivalent to spurious children in civil law terminology, though vulgo quaesiti carries the more specific connotation of uncertain paternity arising from the mother's mode of life, rather than simply illegitimacy in the general sense.
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Common Confusion
Vulgo quaesiti should not be conflated with the broader category of illegitimate children (liberi naturales or spurii), though all vulgo quaesiti are illegitimate. The distinction matters in historical research: liberi naturales could, in Roman and later civil law systems, be legitimated by subsequent marriage of the parents or by imperial rescript. Vulgo quaesiti, having no identifiable father, could not be legitimated through paternal recognition and occupied a distinct and generally lower legal position within the civil law taxonomy of illegitimacy. Using "illegitimate" as a catch-all when reading civil law sources may cause a researcher to miss this more precise classification.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Roman law, canon law, or the civilian tradition will encounter vulgo quaesiti primarily in the context of inheritance and succession. Because Roman law tied succession rights heavily to agnatic (paternal) lineage, children classified as vulgo quaesiti were cut off from the paternal family entirely and could inherit only from their mother and her cognates. This made the classification consequential, not merely descriptive.
In the Law Mind corpus, the term appears most directly in materials touching on Roman private law and its transmission through the Institutes of Justinian. The Digest and Institutes references in Black's (Inst. 3, 4, 8 and Inst. 3, 5, 4) point to the sections governing intestate succession among cognates, where the status of such children is addressed as a limiting condition on inheritance claims.
A key research trap: the phrase is sometimes mistranscribed or misspelled in early printed editions and English-language digests (the misspelling "vulgo quzsiti" appears in some sources, reflecting typesetting errors in older texts). Variant spellings should be anticipated when searching manuscript or early printed materials.
Canon law and later continental civil law systems engaged with this category differently from Roman law. Medieval canonists were concerned with the question of legitimation and sacramental status; the civilian tradition absorbed the Roman taxonomy but adapted it to local succession rules. Researchers moving between Roman sources and, for example, French or Spanish colonial law materials should not assume that the civil law treatment of vulgo quaesiti remained static across time and jurisdiction.
In English common law, the category has no direct equivalent. English law used the simpler binary of legitimate versus illegitimate (filius nullius or filius populi), and did not formally subdivide illegitimacy along the Roman lines. Cross-referencing between common law and civil law treatments of illegitimacy in comparative or mixed-jurisdiction research therefore requires care.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides a compact and accurate entry: "Spurious children; literally, gotten from the people; the offspring of promiscuous cohabitation, who are considered as having no father," with citation to the Institutes of Justinian. The definition is reliable as far as it goes.
What Black's does not address is the doctrinal significance of the classification within the broader Roman law structure of succession — specifically, how the status of vulgo quaesiti interacted with the senatusconsultum Orphitianum (giving children rights to inherit from their mothers) and the senatusconsultum Tertullianum (giving mothers rights to inherit from children). Those senatorial measures were designed in part to address the inheritance relationships of children whose paternal line was unavailable, making vulgo quaesiti a practically relevant class in the development of cognate succession rules. Black's entry, standing alone, conveys the definition without this functional context.
No Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 entry exists for this term. It is pure legal Latin with no common English counterpart, and the COMMON LANGUAGE section is accordingly omitted.
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Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of Roman civil law with no operative role in modern common law jurisdictions. It retains relevance in legal history, comparative law, and the study of civil law systems descended from Roman and canon law traditions, including Louisiana, Quebec, and certain Latin American jurisdictions where civilian concepts of filiation and legitimacy historically informed statutory frameworks.
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