1. Roman law. Divorce; a severance of the marriage tie. • In classical law, no grounds were required. Cf. REPUDIUM.
2. Eccles. law. A decree allowing spouses to separate or declaring their marriage invalid.
“Owing to the fact that the church had but slowly made up her mind to know no such thing as a divorce in our acceptation of that term (i.e., the dissolution of a valid marriage) the term divortium is currently used to signify two very different things, namely (1) the divortium quoad torum, which is the equivalent of our ‘judicial separation,’ and (2) what is very often called the divortium quoad vinculum but is really a declaration of nullity. The persistence of the word divortium in the latter case is a trace of an older state of affairs, but in medieval practice the decree of nullity often served the purpose of a true divorce; spouses who had quarrelled began to investigate their pedigrees and were unlucky if they could discover no impedimentum dirimens.” 2 Frederick Pollock & Frederic W. Maitland, History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I 393 n.5 (2d ed. 1899).
