Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning to take away, remove, or deprive. The word carried three related but contextually distinct applications in the Digest:
1. To take away or remove (in a general sense of physical or legal removal).
2. To deprive a person of something, particularly a right or entitlement.
3. To take back a legacy — that is, for a testator to revoke or withdraw a bequest previously made.
Common Confusion
Burrill's entry groups ADIMERE with the entirely unrelated term ADIRE (also spelled Adyre), a Law French word meaning "to say." The proximity in alphabetical arrangement has led to occasional conflation in older secondary sources. The two words share no meaning and no linguistic origin — ADIMERE is classical Latin; ADIRE (in this sense) is Law French. A researcher encountering either term in a historical document should verify which form is actually present before relying on any definition.
A separate Latin term, adire (hereditatem), meaning to enter upon or accept an inheritance, exists independently in Roman law and is unrelated to the Law French adire meaning "to say." The similarity in spelling across three distinct terms — the Latin verb of deprivation, the Latin verb of inheritance acceptance, and the Law French verb of speech — creates a layered identification problem in historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
ADIMERE is a narrow, technical term of Roman civil law with no direct common law counterpart. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
— Latin-language portions of the Corpus Juris Civilis, particularly the Digest (Digesta Justiniani), where the term appears in its conjugated forms (adimitur, adimi, ademptio).
— English treatises on civil or canon law that incorporate Roman law vocabulary without translation.
— Historical Scottish, Louisiana, and South African legal sources, where Roman-Dutch or Roman law influence kept civilian terminology in active use longer than in English common law jurisdictions.
The testamentary application — revocation of a legacy — is the form most likely to appear in English-language legal sources. This concept is more commonly encountered under the noun form ADEMPTION, which became the standard English and common law term for the same phenomenon (the revocation or failure of a legacy, whether by the testator's act or by the subject matter ceasing to exist). Researchers working on testamentary law in historical sources should index both ADIMERE and ADEMPTION, as the noun and verb forms do not always appear together in historical indexes.
The Digest citations in Burrill (Dig. 43.27.1.pr and Dig. 39.5.7.3 and Dig. 48.10.5) are specific enough to verify, and researchers with access to a Latin edition of the Digest can locate the precise contexts. Dig. 48.10 concerns forgery and falsification (de lege Cornelia de falsis), which indicates the deprivation usage there may relate specifically to criminal consequences or documentary fraud — a narrower and more specific context than the general removal or legacy-revocation senses.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is characteristically spare, offering three distinct glosses with Digest references but no interpretive commentary. The three glosses are not merely synonyms — they mark the range of legal contexts in which the word was applied, from general removal to personal deprivation to testamentary revocation. Burrill does not distinguish which contexts were most common or which were most likely to appear in English-language legal practice, a gap that limits the entry's usefulness for researchers working outside direct Romanist sources.
The entry also contains the apparent editorial shortcut of appending ADIRE (Law French) without any signal that the two terms are unrelated. This appears to be an artifact of strict alphabetical compression rather than a claim that the terms share meaning or usage.
No other shelf sources in the Law Mind corpus contain entries for ADIMERE, which reflects the term's status as a civil law archaism rather than a term of art in English common law dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
ADIMERE has no active use in modern American or English common law. Its practical legal descendants — ADEMPTION in testamentary law and DEPRIVATION or REMOVAL in other contexts — are the operative terms in English-language jurisdictions. Civilian and mixed jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, South Africa) are more likely to preserve the Romanist vocabulary in older legal materials.