It is by no means a necessary consequence, returned the other, winking, with a shrewd look around the bar room; “there is such a thing, I suppose you know, in law as a
filius nullius.
While men fathered children in the sexual economy, they could be absent in a child's life and also in law when a child was declared a bastard and thus
filius nullius.
In British law a bastard was "nobody's child": "Under the ancient legal doctrine of
Filius Nullius, a bastard was .
See 2 KENT, supra note 63, at 175; see also 1 BLACKSTONE, supra note 58, at *447 ("[T]he rights are very few, being only such as he can acquire; for he can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody, and sometimes called
filius nullius.
The common law definition of an illegitimate child as
filius nullius, child of no family, gave way to firm legal recognition of the bond between mother and child.
