Definition
A Law French term meaning to undo, defeat, set aside, or reverse. DEFERE appears in historical legal sources as a verb expressing the act of annulling or invalidating a prior legal act, judgment, or instrument — essentially, to render it of no effect. The term carries the procedural sense of overturning something already done: a ruling reversed, a transaction voided, a proceeding set aside.
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Common Confusion
DEFERE (Law French: to undo or annul) should not be confused with the modern English verb DEFER, which means either to postpone an action to a future time or to yield to the judgment of another. The two words share a surface resemblance and may appear nearly identical in manuscripts and transcriptions, but they have no meaningful legal relationship. Encountering "defere" in a historical source requires a moment's pause to confirm whether the Law French term of reversal or the English verb of postponement is intended.
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Why It Matters in Research
DEFERE is a term researchers encounter almost exclusively in pre-modern common law sources — legal treatises, Year Books, and early English court records — where Law French remained the operative language of legal expression. It does not appear as a living term in contemporary legal practice; no modern statute, rule, or court employs it as a term of art.
Researchers should be alert to two navigational hazards. First, DEFERE can be confused with the English verb "defer" (to postpone, or to yield to another's judgment), which looks nearly identical in transcription but carries an entirely different meaning. A copyist error or OCR misread in a digitized historical source could easily collapse this distinction. When you encounter "defere" in a historical text, context will usually clarify whether the Law French term (to annul) or the later English verb (to postpone or submit) is intended — but the distinction is worth actively checking.
Second, DEFERE belongs to a cluster of Law French terms of negation and reversal — terms like DEFEISANCE, DEFEASIBLE, and ANNUL — that overlap in meaning but were applied with technical precision in medieval pleading and conveyancing practice. A researcher tracing the vocabulary of reversal and avoidance in early common law sources will need to map DEFERE against this broader vocabulary to understand which procedural mechanism a source is describing.
Because the term survives mainly through its derivatives (particularly DEFEASANCE and DEFEASIBLE), researchers working in property law, estates, or the history of common law remedies will find more analytical traction in those related entries. DEFERE itself signals the concept at its most elemental — the act of undoing — which makes it a useful anchor when reading passages where the more technical derivative terms have not yet fully crystallized.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary historical source available for this term, and its entry is characteristically spare: "L. Fr. To undo; to defeat; to set aside or reverse. Kelham." The attribution to Kelham points to Robert Kelham's Glossary of Norman and Old French Words (1779), one of the standard reference works for Law French vocabulary in the common law tradition. Burrill does not elaborate on the procedural context in which DEFERE was employed or provide illustrative usage from primary sources.
The brevity of the Burrill entry is itself informative: it suggests DEFERE was not a high-frequency term even in historical legal usage, but rather a foundational Law French root from which more specialized vocabulary grew. No entry for DEFERE appears in later standard dictionaries such as Black's or Bouvier's, confirming that the term did not survive into the modern American legal lexicon as an independent entry. Researchers should treat Burrill and Kelham as the ceiling of available dictionary-level authority on this term and look to primary sources for any deeper context.
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