Law. In law, there is a natural death and civil death: natural, where nature itself expires; civil, where a person is not actually dead, but adjudged so by law. Thus, if any person, for whose life an estate is granted, remains beyond sea, or is otherwise absent, seven years, and no proof made of his being alive, he shall be accounted naturally dead.

Brothers of Death, a denomination usually given to the religious of the order of St Paul, the first hermit. They are called brothers of death, fratres à morte, on account of the figure of a death's head which they were always to have with them, in order to keep perpetually before them the thoughts of death. This order, by its constitutions made in 1622, does not seem to have been established long before Pope Paul V. Louis XIII. in 1621, permitted them to settle in France. The order was probably suppressed by Pope Urban VIII.

Law of Death-Bed. See Law Index.