Definition
A Latin term from the civil law meaning "to lose." In legal usage, amittere denotes the forfeiture or deprivation of a right, privilege, status, or legal protection — typically as a consequence of wrongdoing, judgment, or legal disability. The term appears most often in compound phrases that specify what is lost and under what circumstances.
Recognized compound forms carry distinct meanings:
1. Amittere curiam: To lose the court; to be deprived of the privilege of attending or having access to the king's court. A punishment that effectively excluded a person from the judicial process as a litigant or suitor.
2. Amittere legem terrae: To lose the protection of the law of the land. This phrase described the condition of a person placed outside the ordinary legal order — one who could no longer invoke the common law's protections or remedies. Closely associated with outlawry and attainder in English legal history.
3. Amittere liberam legem: To lose one's frank-law. Equivalent in substance to amittere legem terrae. A person who lost their frank-law lost the capacity to serve as a witness or juror and was otherwise stripped of the procedural standing that free legal status conferred. Infamy, attainder, and conviction for certain crimes could produce this result.
The Digest maxim preserved in Burrill captures the civil law conception precisely: he is considered to have lost a thing (rem amisisse videtur) who has no action against anyone to recover it. The correlative maxim follows: those to whom a thing never belonged cannot be considered to have lost it. Together, these maxims ground amittere in the idea of prior entitlement — one cannot forfeit what one never possessed.
Why It Matters in Research
Amittere appears almost exclusively in older English, Scots, and civilian legal texts. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as a marker of formal legal consequence — the term signals a structured deprivation of right rather than a casual or incidental loss.
The compound phrases are the more important research objects. Amittere legem terrae and amittere liberam legem are directly connected to the history of outlawry, attainder, and civil death in English law. A researcher tracing the development of civil disabilities — loss of testimonial competence, loss of the right to sue, loss of property rights as incident to conviction — will find amittere compounds appearing in medieval and early modern sources where later doctrine would use different vocabulary entirely.
The Scots derivative "amitt" signals that the term migrated into Scottish legal practice and may appear in Scots legal records and institutional writings without the Latin prefix. Researchers working in Scottish sources should flag this variant.
The Digest references in Burrill (Dig. 50.16.14 and Dig. 50.17.83) connect amittere to the civilian tradition of defining loss by reference to remedial entitlement — a framework that differs meaningfully from common law approaches to forfeiture. Civil law researchers working on comparative or mixed-jurisdiction sources should note this doctrinal undercurrent.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries converge on the core meaning but diverge in depth. Black's First Edition offers only the bare gloss — "to lose" — and notes the Scots derivative. Black's Second Edition expands substantially, providing the three principal compound forms with brief explanatory glosses. Burrill is the most substantively useful of the three, preserving the two Digest maxims that give the term its civil law operational meaning.
None of the source dictionaries trace the procedural consequences of the compound phrases in any detail. The connection between amittere liberam legem and the formal doctrine of civil death, or between amittere legem terrae and outlawry, is left implicit. Researchers should not treat the dictionary entries as exhaustive accounts of what these phrases meant in practice; historical treatises and Year Book materials will be necessary for fuller understanding.
The Digest maxims quoted in Burrill are genuine and traceable. Dig. 50.16.14 (on the meaning of losing a thing) and Dig. 50.17.83 (on the impossibility of losing what was never owned) appear in the title De verborum significatione and the title De diversis regulis juris antiqui respectively — standard locations for civilian definitional and maxim material.
Jurisdictional Note
The civil law core of amittere is Roman and therefore broadly shared across civilian jurisdictions. The compound English-law phrases — particularly amittere legem terrae and amittere liberam legem — are specific to the English common law tradition and its Scots offshoot. Researchers in Continental civilian sources will encounter the base term but not these English compound forms.