Definition
A Law French adverb and preposition meaning "out of," "outside of," "beyond," or "foreign to." In legal usage, *dehors* describes evidence, facts, or matter that exist outside of—and are therefore extrinsic to—a particular instrument, record, or proceeding. The most common phrase is *dehors the record*, meaning outside or foreign to the record of a case; matter *dehors the record* is not contained within and cannot be verified by reference to that record.
The term also appears in the context of written instruments generally: evidence *dehors a will*, *dehors a contract*, or *dehors an agreement* refers to extrinsic evidence—facts or statements that lie outside the four corners of the document itself.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Military fortification terminology. *Dehors* in general usage refers to outworks or advanced defensive structures built at a distance from the main fortification.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Out of; without; foreign to; out of the agreement, record, will, or other instrument."
Webster's 1913 preserves the legal sense intact, which is unusual. The Wiktionary definition reflects a specialized military engineering sense that has almost no overlap with legal usage. A researcher encountering *dehors* in a fortification treatise and a chancery record is reading two functionally unrelated uses of the same word. The legal sense is purely spatial-relational: something that exists outside the boundaries of a defined legal instrument or proceeding.
---
Common Confusion
*Dehors* is occasionally conflated with *aliunde*, a Latin term carrying substantially the same meaning ("from another place" or "from outside"). The two are functional synonyms in legal writing, but *dehors* appears more frequently in English common law sources drawing on Law French, while *aliunde* appears more often in civil law and equity contexts. Anderson's Dictionary of Law notes the equivalence directly. Neither term carries a substantive difference in legal effect; the distinction is stylistic and jurisdictional, not doctrinal.
---
Why It Matters in Research
**Corpus navigation.** *Dehors* is a Law French survival that persisted in anglophone legal writing well into the nineteenth century, particularly in English equity practice and early American case law. Researchers working with pre-1900 opinions, pleadings, or treatises will encounter it regularly in discussions of the parol evidence rule, will construction, and the limits of collateral attack on judgments.
**Parol evidence and instrument construction.** The phrase *dehors the instrument* or *dehors the will* is the older equivalent of what modern courts call "extrinsic evidence." When reading nineteenth-century equity cases on will construction or contract interpretation, *dehors* signals an argument about whether evidence outside the document's text may be admitted—precisely the terrain of the modern parol evidence rule. Recognizing the term prevents researchers from misreading an evidentiary argument as something else.
**Collateral attack on judgments.** *Dehors the record* appears in discussions of when a judgment may be impeached or falsified by facts not appearing in the record itself. Anderson's notes that a judgment may be falsified by matter *dehors the record*—a principle connected to the distinction between void and voidable judgments. This is an important conceptual node for researchers tracing the history of res judicata and collateral estoppel.
**Declining frequency.** The term largely disappears from American legal writing after the early twentieth century, replaced by plain-English equivalents like "extrinsic," "outside the record," or "aliunde." Researchers using full-text search tools should not assume that absence of the word *dehors* means absence of the concept in modern sources—and vice versa, should not assume its presence in historical sources signals a doctrine distinct from modern extrinsic evidence analysis.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in near-complete agreement. Black's (both editions), Burrill's, and Anderson's all define *dehors* as "out of; without; beyond; foreign to; unconnected with," and all anchor the definition to the canonical phrase *dehors the record*. The Blackstone reference (*Commentaries* 2:387, or 8 Bl. Comm. 387 depending on edition numbering) appears in Black's and Burrill's, grounding the term in foundational common law authority.
Anderson's adds the most substantive gloss, noting the term's application to evidence "outside of a record, agreement, will, or other instrument" and connecting it explicitly to *aliunde*—a useful cross-reference the other dictionaries omit. Anderson's also gestures toward the falsification of judgments by matter *dehors the record*, which situates the term within a live doctrinal context rather than treating it as merely definitional.
No significant divergence exists among the sources. What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the term's practical connection to what would become the parol evidence rule—a researcher relying solely on these definitions would understand the word but might not immediately grasp its doctrinal stakes in instrument construction cases.
---
Jurisdictional Note
*Dehors* is primarily a term of English common law and equity, carried into American legal writing through that inheritance. It appears across U.S. jurisdictions in nineteenth-century case law without meaningful regional variation in meaning, though frequency of use varies. Civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana) use the functionally equivalent Latin *aliunde* in preference to this Law French term.
---