Definition
ALEXANDER M is not a recognized legal term, doctrine, or concept. The entry appearing in Burrill's Law Dictionary under this heading is not a substantive legal definition but rather a publisher's or printer's notation — specifically, a copyright registration imprint of the type required under nineteenth-century U.S. copyright law. The text associated with the entry reads as a deposit notice referencing the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, consistent with the formalities of the Copyright Act of 1831 and its successors, which required deposit and registration in a federal district court clerk's office as a condition of copyright protection.
In this context, "Alexander M" most likely refers to Alexander M. Burrill himself — the compiler and author of the dictionary — with the entry position in the "A" section resulting from the publisher's practice of printing the copyright notice at or near the beginning of the volume, which in a dictionary formatted alphabetically would appear to sit among early entries.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers accessing Burrill's Law Dictionary in digitized or transcribed form may encounter "ALEXANDER M" as what appears to be a headword entry in the "A" section. This is a transcription artifact, not a legal term. Optical character recognition (OCR) processing of historical legal texts frequently converts front-matter copyright notices, printer's marks, and registration boilerplate into pseudo-entries when the source material is indexed by headword or alphabetical position.
A researcher encountering this term in a corpus search should treat it as a data quality signal: if "ALEXANDER M" surfaces as a match in a full-text or indexed search of Burrill's, it indicates the search tool is indexing publisher front matter alongside substantive legal content. Any results cluster around this term should be filtered out or disregarded as non-substantive. It does not indicate a legal doctrine, historical rule, or term of art.
This kind of artifact is common across nineteenth-century legal dictionaries in digitized collections. Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary (early editions), and similar volumes all contain copyright deposits, dedications, and prefatory material that can be misread as content by automated indexing systems.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary (1859) is a two-volume American legal dictionary notable for its breadth of Latin and law French terminology and its detailed treatment of pleading and common law procedure. Alexander M. Burrill was a New York attorney whose dictionary drew heavily on English legal sources and aimed to serve American practitioners navigating a legal system still deeply rooted in English common law forms.
The text associated with this entry is the statutory copyright deposit notice, not a definition. The phrase "Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by BURRILL, In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York" is standard mid-nineteenth-century copyright boilerplate. The appended "Rec. Act, 21, 1890" is anomalous and may represent a later reprint or re-registration notation added to a subsequent edition or facsimile.
No historical legal dictionary — including Bouvier (1856 or 1914 editions), Black's (1891 or later), or Tomlin's Law Dictionary — contains a headword entry for "ALEXANDER M" as a term of law.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No relevant Law Mind Encyclopedia entry applies to this term. The Mergers and Acquisitions — Antitrust Considerations in M&A entry is not related.
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