Definition
A Latin term meaning "one of the two." Used in older legal writing to designate one person or thing chosen or distinguished from a pair — that is, one out of exactly two alternatives, not one out of many. The term functions as a precise binary selector, identifying a single member of a two-part set without specifying which member is meant.
Why It Matters in Research
ALTERUTER is a term of narrow, archaic usage encountered almost exclusively in early English common law reports and Latin legal formularies. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century materials — particularly Year Books, early chancery records, or English common law reports from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — may encounter it in procedural or pleading contexts where a court or document refers to one of two parties, claims, or instruments without yet specifying which. It signals a binary choice or distinction, and misreading it as a general indefinite reference (equivalent to "one of several") would distort the legal meaning of the surrounding text.
The term has essentially no living presence in modern legal writing. It does not appear in contemporary American or English statutes, court rules, or judicial opinions. Its research value is therefore almost entirely historical: recognizing the word and understanding its precise scope — strictly a pair, not a larger group — is what matters.
Researchers should note that Burrill's cross-reference to the phrase ALTA MARIS (high seas) and the headword GALEA in the same dictionary context appears to reflect a typographic or editorial proximity in the source volume rather than any substantive legal relationship between those terms and ALTERUTER itself. Do not infer a conceptual connection.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines ALTERUTER simply as "one of the two," citing 1 Lord Raymond 124 as authority. The entry is brief to the point of terseness, offering no elaboration on procedural context or field of use. The Lord Raymond citation places the term in early eighteenth-century English common law reporting, consistent with the period when Latin phrases remained standard in court records and pleadings.
Historical legal dictionaries generally give ALTERUTER minimal treatment, reflecting its limited functional role: it was a term of precision rather than doctrine, used to specify binary reference rather than to define a legal right, remedy, or status. No significant divergence exists among historical sources on its meaning — the consensus is uniform. What historical sources collectively omit is any discussion of how the term operated within specific pleading formulas or procedural rules, leaving researchers dependent on the primary sources themselves for that context.