Definition
Latin: "to lose the law of the land." A phrase from early English law describing the formal forfeiture of a person's legal standing — specifically, the loss of the protection and benefits afforded by the law of the land. A person who had amittere legem terrae was stripped of their capacity to use the courts, give testimony, and claim the ordinary rights and remedies available to free subjects. The condition was a consequence of certain serious offenses or legal disabilities, most prominently outlawry, attainder, and conviction for crimen falsi (crimes involving fraud or dishonesty). It was not merely a punishment in the modern penal sense but a legal status: the affected person was, in effect, cast outside the law's protection.
Common Confusion
Amittere legem terrae is closely related to outlawry but is not identical to it. Outlawry was the formal process by which a fugitive from justice was declared an outlaw — beyond the king's peace and subject to being killed on sight. Amittere legem terrae describes the legal consequence that attended outlawry and similar conditions: the forfeiture of legal standing. A person might suffer the loss of the law of the land through attainder or conviction for perjury without being declared an outlaw in the procedural sense. The phrase should also be distinguished from civil death (civiliter mortuus), which operated similarly but arose primarily through entry into holy orders or perpetual imprisonment.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English legal sources — Year Books, treatises from Bracton through Coke, and commentaries on Magna Carta. It is rarely encountered in American materials and, when it does appear, surfaces in historical discussions of outlawry, attainder, or the constitutional guarantee of due process rather than in operative legal doctrine.
Researchers tracing the history of due process and the phrase "law of the land" in Magna Carta Chapter 39 (later Chapter 29) will encounter amittere legem terrae as part of the interpretive apparatus surrounding that clause. Medieval and early modern jurists treated the forfeiture of legal standing as one of the recognized exceptions through which a person might be deprived of rights — alongside imprisonment and disseisin — and the phrase marks the outer boundary of legal personhood in that framework.
A practical trap: because the phrase is Latin and technical, it can be misread or mis-indexed in older digests and calendar entries. Researchers working in manuscript sources or early printed Year Books should be alert to variant spellings and abbreviations. The phrase is sometimes rendered amittere legem or abbreviated in ways that obscure the full meaning.
The connection to crimen falsi is significant for researchers interested in testimonial competency. Under common law, conviction for perjury or other offenses involving dishonesty historically disqualified a witness — a rule traceable in part to the logic of amittere legem terrae. The concept thus has downstream relevance to evidence law even though the phrase itself fell out of use long before evidence law was systematized.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence define the phrase concisely as "to lose the protection afforded by the law of the land," which is accurate as far as it goes but understates the active dimension of the concept. The loss was not merely defensive (loss of protection from the state) but also offensive: the person lost the right to invoke legal process on their own behalf — to sue, to testify, to hold property in the ordinary legal sense.
Broader historical sources, particularly Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae and Coke's commentary on Magna Carta in the Second Part of the Institutes, treat the phrase in the context of the lawful judgment requirement of Chapter 39. Coke's reading of "law of the land" as equivalent to "due process of law" draws on this tradition, treating amittere legem terrae as one of the recognized legal mechanisms by which rights could be lawfully forfeited — but only through proper judgment, not arbitrary royal command. This interpretive lineage is important for understanding how a medieval Latin phrase fed directly into Anglo-American constitutional vocabulary.
Historical dictionaries generally do not capture this constitutional genealogy. The entry in Rapalje and Lawrence is representative: accurate in substance but stripped of the interpretive context that makes the phrase significant.
Jurisdictional Note
The concept is specific to English common law and has no operative equivalent in modern American or English law. It survives in American legal history primarily through Magna Carta scholarship and historical treatments of outlawry and attainder, both of which are constitutionally prohibited in the United States.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See OUTLAWRY; ATTAINDER; LAW OF THE LAND