Definition
One who adjourns; a person who formally postpones or suspends a proceeding and assigns a new day for its continuation. In historical legal usage, the term carried a more specific procedural sense: the officer or authority who formally summoned parties to appear at an appointed day or who continued a matter by assigning a subsequent day of appearance. The role was not merely passive — the adjourner exercised a recognized procedural power to defer judicial or quasi-judicial business.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Agent noun of adjourn; one who adjourns.
Historical common usage: Not separately defined in Webster's 1913 as a standalone entry; "adjourn" in that period carried its standard sense of suspending a meeting or session to a later time.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but worth noting. In ordinary usage, "adjourner" simply describes anyone who pauses a meeting. In historical legal usage, the term implied a formal procedural authority — the adjourner was typically an officer of the court or presiding authority acting within a recognized legal framework, not merely any participant who called for a break.
Why It Matters in Research
ADJOURNER is a term researchers are more likely to encounter in older English and Anglo-Norman legal sources than in modern American materials. Its presence in Law French dictionaries signals that it belongs to the procedural vocabulary of medieval and early modern English court practice, where the formal assignment of court days (jours) was a discrete legal act with jurisdictional significance.
Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century English legal records, plea rolls, or Year Books may encounter adjourner (or its Law French cognates) in contexts where the identity of the adjourning authority mattered — particularly when a question arose about whether an adjournment was validly made and by whom. An adjournment made without proper authority could affect the continuity of proceedings or the validity of subsequent acts.
The term is rarely used in modern American legal writing. When it appears, it is almost always in a historical or comparative context. Researchers should not expect to find it as a live term of art in contemporary case law or statutes. If searching Law Mind corpus sources for this term, concentrate on English legal history materials, Law French glossaries, and procedural treatises predating the nineteenth century.
The related concept — the act of adjourning and its legal consequences — remains fully alive in modern practice under ADJOURNMENT. The agent noun, however, did not survive the transition to modern legal English with any distinct technical meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term and treats it economically. Burrill derives adjourner from the Law French jour (a day) and defines it in two related senses: first, to give or assign a day, with the implication of summoning a party to appear; second, to give another day — that is, a day subsequent to an original day of appearance — effectively meaning to continue or postpone. Burrill cites Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum for the verb form adjurnare and the Law French Dictionary for the second sense.
This dual sense is worth preserving. The first sense (assigning a day for appearance) is closer to a summons function; the second (giving a further day) is the familiar postponement function. These were not always the same act in early English procedure, and the distinction could matter in analyzing medieval court records.
No other shelf sources in the Law Mind collection address this term directly. The entry is too narrow and archaic to have attracted sustained treatment in the major American legal dictionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is effectively confined to English legal history and has no distinct jurisdictional variation in American law. The function it describes — the authority to postpone proceedings — is universally recognized across American jurisdictions, but the term adjourner itself plays no role in that doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See ADJOURNMENT for the doctrine governing the act, its procedural requirements, and its modern legal consequences.