Definition
A Law French term meaning "at another time" or "formerly." In historical legal usage, *alterfoits* (also encountered as *autrefoits* in variant spellings) appeared in pleading contexts to indicate that a matter had previously occurred or been adjudicated. It is most closely associated with the pleas of *autrefois acquit* and *autrefois convict* — formal pleas asserting that a defendant had already been tried and acquitted or convicted of the same offense, and therefore could not be tried again.
The term itself is a functional adverb in Law French, not a standalone plea or doctrine, but it serves as the root element in the compound pleading terms that carry substantive legal weight.
Common Confusion
ALTERFOITS and AUTREFOITS: These are variant spellings of the same Law French term, with *autrefoits* being the more commonly encountered form in surviving legal literature and modern scholarly discussion. Burrill records *alterfoits* as the entry form, but researchers will encounter *autrefoits* far more frequently when searching for the double jeopardy pleas. Do not treat these as distinct terms. Additional variants (*autrefois*, *autre fois*) appear across different periods and jurisdictions. Inconsistent spelling is characteristic of Law French generally and is especially pronounced in this term across manuscript and printed sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this term is as a key to the spelling variants that unlock the double jeopardy plea literature. If you encounter *alterfoits* in a historical source, it is almost certainly pointing toward the plea structure of *autrefois acquit* or *autrefois convict* — the procedural mechanisms by which a defendant invoked prior jeopardy to bar a new prosecution.
Researchers working in Year Book materials, early common law pleading records, or colonial American criminal procedure will encounter multiple spellings of this root term. Burrill's single citation (Yearb. M. 8 Edw. III. 20) places the term firmly in the mid-fourteenth century English common law tradition. Researchers should not expect *alterfoits* as a search term to surface the full range of relevant materials — searching on *autrefoits*, *autrefois*, and the compound plea names will recover substantially more.
The term has no meaningful modern standalone usage. Its survival in legal dictionaries is archival rather than practical: it persists because the plea vocabulary descends from it, not because practitioners use *alterfoits* as a term of art today.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal — a translation ("at another time; formerly") and a single Year Book citation. This is consistent with Burrill's treatment of Law French adverbial terms as reference anchors rather than substantive entries. The entry does not explain the pleading context, presumably because Burrill addresses the substantive double jeopardy pleas under their full compound forms.
No elaboration on doctrine, no discussion of the plea's operation, and no cross-references are offered. For researchers, this means Burrill's *alterfoits* entry is a finding aid to the spelling, not a guide to the doctrine. The historical dictionary record for this specific spelling is thin; the doctrine it indexes is well-developed elsewhere.
Jurisdictional Note
The *autrefois* pleas rooted in this term survived transportation into common law jurisdictions including England, the American colonies, and later the United States, where the underlying principle was eventually constitutionalized through the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The specific Law French terminology largely gave way to statutory and constitutional language in American practice by the nineteenth century, though the plea forms persisted longer in English practice.