Definition
In Scots law, to assoinzie (also spelled assoyzie or assoilzie) is to acquit, absolve, or discharge a party from a legal claim or criminal charge. As a noun, an assoinzie is the formal excuse or justification offered by a defendant, or the act of absolution itself. The term encompasses both the plea offered in defense and the judicial act of releasing a party from liability or accusation.
Common Confusion
ASSOINZIE / ASSOILZIE / ABSOLVITOR: Researchers encountering Scottish legal records may find assoinzie, assoilzie, and absolvitor used in overlapping contexts. Absolvitor is the formal decree of the court acquitting a defender in a civil action; assoinzie more often refers to the excuse or plea tendered, or to the act of excusing a party, rather than specifically to the operative decree. The spelling varies considerably across historical manuscripts, which compounds the difficulty of identifying the term in transcribed records.
Why It Matters in Research
This is an archaic Scots law term with almost no modern legal usage. Researchers will encounter it exclusively in historical Scottish criminal and civil records, particularly trial transcripts, court minutes, and pleading rolls from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The single citation in Burrill — to Pitcairn's Criminal Trials — places it squarely in the domain of early modern Scottish criminal procedure.
Several practical traps await corpus researchers:
Spelling instability is significant. Assoinzie, assoilzie, assoilye, assoyzie, and variant forms all appear in period sources. Full-text searches using only one spelling will miss substantial occurrences. Researchers working in manuscript or early-print sources should run multiple spelling variants and consider wildcard searches.
The term straddles procedure and substance. In some usages, assoinzie refers to the excuse or defense a party formally offers (analogous to a plea in bar or a justification). In other usages, it refers to the court's act of accepting that excuse and discharging the party. Context within the record is necessary to determine which sense applies.
The Pitcairn citation is valuable. Robert Pitcairn's Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833) is a primary resource for early Scottish criminal procedure and transcribes records from approximately 1488 to 1624. Volume 2 of that work is the direct source Burrill cites, making it the logical next stop for any researcher seeking documentary context for this term in use.
Connection to broader Scots procedural vocabulary: researchers encountering assoinzie will likely also encounter related terms from the same procedural tradition — decreet, absolvitor, diet, compearance — and should map the full vocabulary of the relevant court before drawing conclusions about a single term's meaning in a specific record.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the standard historical legal dictionaries, and it is characteristically spare: "Sc. Excuse. 2 Pitcairn's Crim. Trials, 65." This brevity reflects the term's narrow jurisdictional range and its obsolescence even by the mid-nineteenth century when Burrill was compiled. No entry appears in Black's Law Dictionary (early editions), Bouvier's, Jacob's Law Dictionary, or Tomlin's Law Dictionary, which confirms that the term was understood as a Scots-specific archaism with no reception in English common law or American practice.
The single-word gloss "excuse" in Burrill is accurate as far as it goes but does not capture the procedural specificity of the term. In Pitcairn's records, the term functions within a formal court setting — it is not merely an informal excuse but a recognized procedural act tied to the disposition of a case. Researchers should treat Burrill's gloss as a starting point, not a complete account.
Jurisdictional Note
Assoinzie is exclusively a Scots law term. It has no counterpart in English common law and does not appear in American legal usage. Research touching on this term is confined to Scottish legal records, and the operative procedural framework is that of the pre-Union and early-Union Scottish courts, including the High Court of Justiciary and the Court of Session.