Definition
A Law French adverb meaning "otherwise." Used in older legal pleading and common law practice to signal an alternative statement or a contrasting legal proposition — that something occurred, was constituted, or should be understood in a different manner than previously stated or implied. The term appears most frequently in compound legal phrases and pleas, often as a prefix or particle indicating an alternative or prior condition (as in the related pleas autrefois acquit and autrefois convict, derived from the same Law French root).
Common Confusion
Auterment is easily confused with — or lost within — the family of autrefois pleas (autrefois acquit, autrefois convict), which are the best-known surviving legal compounds from the same Law French root. The autrefois pleas are substantive double jeopardy defenses with ongoing procedural life; auterment itself is a bare adverb that appears primarily as a particle in historical pleading formulas, not as a standalone plea or doctrine. Researchers encountering auterment in a manuscript or printed report should not assume they are reading a shortened form of an autrefois plea. The words share a root but serve different functions in text.
Why It Matters in Research
Auterment is encountered almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English common law materials — Year Books, early reports, and the pleading literature of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Its significance is navigational rather than substantive: when a researcher finds the word in a primary source, it marks a pivot in the pleading or argument, signaling that an alternative legal characterization or a contrasting factual claim follows.
Several traps attend this term in the Law Mind corpus:
First, auterment is not indexed as a standalone doctrine in most historical digests. Researchers will not find it in the subject indices of Viner's Abridgment or Comyn's Digest under its own heading; they are more likely to encounter it embedded in plea language quoted in the text of entries on pleading, estoppel, or former jeopardy.
Second, the Law French orthography varies. Variant spellings — autrement, autrment, autremont — appear across manuscript and early print sources. A corpus search limited to a single spelling will miss occurrences. Researchers working with digitized Year Books or early plea rolls should build searches that accommodate these variants.
Third, because Burrill's entry for auterment appears in close proximity to the Greek entry for autexousios (one who is sui juris), there is a minor risk of conflation in notes or excerpts from that dictionary. The two terms are unrelated; the adjacency is alphabetical coincidence.
For Law Mind corpus work, the term is most useful as a signal of Law French pleading style and period, helping researchers date or contextualize undated fragments and confirm they are working in the pre-modern common law tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines auterment simply and correctly as the Law French word for "otherwise." The entry is brief, consistent with the term's function as a grammatical particle rather than a term of art carrying its own doctrine. Burrill does not elaborate on usage contexts or provide illustrative pleading examples, which is a gap for the researcher seeking to understand how the word functioned in actual pleading practice.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind shelf treats auterment as a primary entry. The term's fuller context must be reconstructed from the pleading treatises — Gould on Pleading, Stephen on Pleading — where Law French particles appear in quoted plea forms, rather than from the dictionary literature.
The broader Law French lexicon of which auterment is a part was well documented by legal antiquarians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the individual particles and adverbs received little systematic treatment compared to the substantive nouns and phrases. This creates an asymmetry in the historical reference literature: the autrefois pleas are richly documented; the adverbial particles that appear alongside them are not.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Law French term of art, auterment has no independent jurisdictional life in American law. It belongs to the English common law pleading tradition and appears in American sources only in historical or comparative discussions of that tradition. Researchers working in Louisiana civil law sources will not encounter it.