Definition
Latin: "to lose the court." A penalty in old English law by which a person was deprived of the privilege of attending the king's court. In practical terms, the offender was barred from access to royal courts — a significant civil disability in a legal system where court attendance was both a right and, for certain classes, a duty. The phrase appears in medieval statutes as a formal sanction, distinct from imprisonment or fine, targeting a person's standing within the court system itself.
Common Confusion
AMITTERE CURIAM is closely associated with two related Latin phrases that researchers frequently conflate:
AMITTERE LEGEM TERRAE (also rendered AMITTERE LIBERAM LEGEM): "to lose the law of the land" or "to lose one's franklaw." This was a broader and more severe disability — the loss of the right to take an oath in any court, effectively destroying one's legal credibility as a witness or party. A person who lost their franklaw was said to be "infamous" in the technical legal sense.
The distinction matters: losing the court (amittere curiam) barred attendance and access; losing the law of the land (amittere legem terrae) stripped a person of legal competence to participate in proceedings at all. The two penalties could overlap but were not identical in scope or consequence. Burrill treats them as separate entries precisely because researchers and copyists historically ran them together.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering amittere curiam in primary sources are almost always working with medieval English statutes or their glosses, most likely Statute of Westminster II (1285) or similar enactments. The phrase signals a formal sanction regime that predates modern concepts of contempt of court, disbarment, or civil disability — do not map modern analogues onto it without care.
The key navigational trap is the cluster of amittere phrases. Medieval legal Latin used amittere (to lose) across a family of related penalties — curiam, legem terrae, liberam legem — and early modern copyists and abridgers sometimes conflated or abbreviated them. When a source uses amittere alone, context must determine which privilege or right was being forfeited.
For corpus researchers, this term connects the Law Mind materials on franklaw, legal capacity, and medieval court procedure. It is unlikely to appear in post-medieval case law in operative form, but may surface in historical treatises glossing earlier statutes, in Year Book scholarship, or in antiquarian legal dictionaries citing the Westminster statutes. Its presence in a source is a strong indicator of engagement with pre-common-law English legal procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries are in substantive agreement: both define the term as "to lose the court" and gloss it as deprivation of the privilege of attending court. Burrill adds the direct statutory citation (Stat. Westm. 2, c. 44) and the operative Latin phrase from that statute — amittant curiam regis — which is genuinely useful for primary source verification. Black's follows Burrill closely, as it does for much of its Latin legal vocabulary, but omits the statutory reference.
Both sources immediately append the related phrase amittere legem terrae (or liberam legem), which signals that the historical dictionaries themselves recognized the need to distinguish the cluster. Burrill's entry on amittere liberam legem extends to the loss of legal capacity to swear oaths — the franklaw disability — which is a materially different and more severe consequence. Neither dictionary provides substantive historical commentary beyond the definition and statutory gloss; for deeper treatment, researchers should consult specialized scholarship on medieval English court procedure and the Westminster statutes directly.
What the historical sources do not address: the procedural mechanism by which the penalty was imposed, the range of offenses that triggered it, or how the sanction interacted with other forms of outlawry or civil disability. These gaps are characteristic of the dictionary genre of the period, which prioritized translation over legal analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
Strictly an English legal historical term. No American or modern common law jurisdiction employs this term operatively. Its relevance is confined to research into medieval English law, the Westminster statutes, and the history of court access and legal capacity in the common law tradition.