Definition
A Latin and Law Latin term meaning "forjudged" — that is, deprived of a right, property, or claim by judicial judgment. The term describes the condition of a person or thing that has been adjudged away from its holder through a court's decision, typically signifying that a party has been stripped of something by the authority of a legal proceeding. It is the past participial form and corresponds closely to the verb *abjudicare*, meaning to adjudge away from, to deny by judicial sentence, or to deprive by court order.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources and will surface in older pleading records, civil law commentaries, and English common law treatises where Latin and Law Latin terminology remained standard. Researchers encountering *abjudicatus* in a primary source should treat it as a signal that the document is describing a judicial deprivation of right — a party who has lost a claim, property interest, or legal standing not by abandonment or agreement, but by court adjudication against them.
The practical trap: *abjudicatus* can be confused with related terms of deprivation and forfeiture if a researcher does not recognize the specifically judicial mechanism at its core. The "forjudged" gloss in Burrill points toward the Anglo-Norman legal tradition, where "forjudgment" carried a specific procedural meaning of being adjudged out of court or out of a right. A researcher working in medieval and early modern English records may encounter "forjudged" as the vernacular equivalent in the same documents where *abjudicatus* appears in the Latin portions.
Because this term appears in Burrill's cross-reference structure pointing toward *abjudicare*, researchers should follow that thread. The conceptual cluster — *abjudicare*, *abjudicatio*, *abjudicatus* — represents a family of related terms in the civil law tradition dealing with judicial alienation of right, and the full meaning of any one term is enriched by consulting the others.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the shelf sources, and it is minimal: the definition is rendered simply as "Forjudged," with a cross-reference to *abjudicare*. This brevity is itself informative — Burrill treats *abjudicatus* as a derived form requiring no independent elaboration beyond its verb root, suggesting that practitioners consulting his dictionary were expected to be familiar enough with Latin participial forms to reconstruct the meaning. The entry's cross-reference structure is characteristic of Burrill's method for Latin law terms, where the primary conceptual work is done under the infinitive form.
No entry appears in the other major historical dictionaries represented in the Law Mind corpus, which confirms that *abjudicatus* was a term of art encountered in sources rather than in active practice — a reading term, not a drafting term, by the time English-language legal dictionaries became standard tools.