Idiom
caveat emptor
Formal Roman origin
Meaning
Let the buyer beware — checking what you are buying is your own problem.
Examples
“It's sold as seen — caveat emptor.”
“At an auction of unexamined lots the only rule that really applies is caveat emptor.”
“The marketplace's terms disclaimed responsibility for every listing on it, which reduced a platform handling millions of transactions to a caveat emptor arrangement of the kind the law spent a century dismantling.”
Examples
simple
“It's sold as seen — caveat emptor.”
contextual
“At an auction of unexamined lots the only rule that really applies is caveat emptor.”
complex
“The marketplace's terms disclaimed responsibility for every listing on it, which reduced a platform handling millions of transactions to a caveat emptor arrangement of the kind the law spent a century dismantling.”
Origin
The Latin is Roman; the rule is not. Roman law leaned the other way. The aediles who policed the markets issued an edict requiring sellers of slaves and cattle to declare defects, and a buyer who found an undeclared one could return the goods and get the money back. That is closer to modern consumer protection than to caveat emptor.
Caveat emptor — let the buyer beware — was formulated by English common lawyers in the sixteenth century, in Latin because that is what lawyers wrote in, and it hardened into the default rule of English sale: inspect it yourself, because the seller owes you nothing but honesty about what he actually said.
Statute has been eating away at it for over a century, and in consumer sales it has largely gone. The phrase survives in English as a general warning, usually attached to anything sold privately, cheaply, or at speed.
Stories
The Law's Latin · See all Roman origin
Roman legal Latin that never left the courtroom — or the boardroom.
bona fide — Genuine and honestly meant — the real thing, not a pretence.
quid pro quo — Something given in return for something else, usually as an understood trade.
de facto — In practice, whatever the official position says.
de jure — According to the law, whether or not that is what actually happens.
ipso facto — By that very fact — the consequence follows automatically, with no further step.
the status quo — The way things currently are, especially when someone wants to keep them that way.
- Level
- C1 · Advanced
- Updated