Præscription

Full definition of præscription

Noun

1. Obsolete spelling of en
• 1651, Thomas Hobbes, , chapter 26: ''Of Civill Lawes

• 2007, Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy, If the Soveraign of one Common-wealth, subdue a People that have lived under other written Lawes, and afterwards govern them by the same Lawes, by which they were governed before; yet those Lawes are the Civill Lawes of the Victor, and not of the Vanquished Common-wealth. For the Legislator is he, not by whose authority the Lawes were first made, but by whose authority they now continue to be Lawes. And therefore where there be divers Provinces, within the Dominion of a Common-wealth, and in those Provinces diversity of Lawes, which commonly are called the Customes of each severall Province, we are not to understand that such Customes have their force, onely from Length of Time; but that they were antiently Lawes written, or otherwise made known, for the Constitutions, and Statutes of their Soveraigns; and are not Lawes, not by vertueof the Præscription of time, but by the Constitutions of their present Soveraigns. But if an unwritten Law, in all the Provinces of a Dominion, shall be generally observed, and no iniquity appear in the use thereof; that Law can be no other but a Law of Nature, equally obliging all man-kind.
• 1793, Sir John Comyns and Stewart Kyd, A Digest of the Laws of England, volume 6, page 78, section titlePRÆSCRIPTION.