Definition
De recto deficere (Latin: "to fail of right") is a term from medieval English and French law describing the failure of an inferior court or feudal lord's court to do justice — whether by deferring, evading, or outright refusing to adjudicate a matter brought before it. The phrase names both the act of default and the condition that triggered a superior authority's intervention or a formal appeal.
In the old English common law, de recto deficere was the predicate condition that justified a litigant's resort to a higher court. When an inferior tribunal failed of right — that is, failed to render justice — the aggrieved party could seek relief above. In the parallel French feudal tradition, the same concept gave rise to the appel de défaute de droit, a formal proceeding available when a lord's court delayed, evaded, or denied justice to the parties before it.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating early English common law procedure and feudal jurisdictional hierarchy — primarily Glanvill, Bracton, and Reeves' History of the English Law. Researchers encountering the phrase in those sources should recognize it as a term of art describing jurisdictional failure, not substantive wrong. It is not a cause of action in the modern sense; it is a procedural predicate — the threshold condition that opened the door to a superior forum.
The practical significance in corpus research is navigational: de recto deficere clusters with materials on the writ of right, the structure of feudal courts, and the mechanisms by which the royal courts of England expanded their jurisdiction at the expense of seignorial and county courts during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A researcher tracing the growth of royal jurisdiction will find this phrase at precisely that jurisdictional seam.
The French parallel (appel de défaute de droit, treated in Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois) is a distinct but cognate institution. Burrill's entry bridges both, which is unusual. Researchers working on comparative feudal procedure or the intellectual history of appellate jurisdiction should note this cross-channel connection, though the English and French mechanisms differed in form and consequence.
Because the term belongs to a legal world that predates modern court hierarchy, it does not map cleanly onto contemporary concepts of appellate review, mandamus, or supervisory jurisdiction — though all of those have distant ancestry in the problems de recto deficere was meant to address.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source dictionary for this entry, and its treatment is brief but accurate. Burrill defines the term, supplies its literal translation, cites the primary sources (Glanvill lib. 12, c. 1; Bracton fol. 105, 313b, 329b; and Reeves' History of the English Law, vol. 1, p. 171), and notes the French analogue from Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. This is a well-constructed entry for a narrow historical term.
The references to Glanvill and Bracton are genuine and verifiable: Glanvill's Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Angliae (c. 1187–1189) and Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (mid-thirteenth century) are the foundational treatises of early English common law, and both address the conditions under which inferior courts could be bypassed or compelled. Reeves' History of the English Law is a legitimate secondary source from the eighteenth century that surveys this period systematically.
What Burrill's entry does not supply — and what no standard historical law dictionary fully addresses — is the broader procedural machinery surrounding de recto deficere: specifically, how the writ of right and related writs operated as the instrument by which a superior court took jurisdiction once an inferior court had failed of right. Researchers need Glanvill and Bracton directly for that level of procedural detail.
Jurisdictional Note
De recto deficere is a term of English and French feudal law with no surviving operational meaning in modern common law jurisdictions. It is a historical research term only. Its relevance today is confined to legal history, the study of medieval procedure, and the intellectual genealogy of appellate and supervisory jurisdiction.