Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning one who casts off, casts out, or throws down. Derived from the Latin *dejicere*, the term appears in early Anglo-Norman legal texts and Law French dictionaries as a descriptor for an actor who dispossesses, displaces, or forcibly removes another — whether from land, office, or possession. In its broadest historical usage, it denotes the agent of a dejection: the party who effects an ouster or casting out.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Something that casts down or diminishes.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who casts down, or dejects.
The common usage carries a psychological or figurative sense — something that lowers spirits or diminishes. The legal sense is narrower and physical: the term refers specifically to the actor who dispossesses or ejects another, grounding it in the law of property and possession rather than in affect or condition.
Why It Matters in Research
DEJECTER is a term researchers are most likely to encounter in early English and Anglo-Norman legal manuscripts, Year Books, or Law French pleading records. It will not appear in modern legal databases in any operative sense, and searching for it in contemporary sources will return nothing useful.
The key research trap is confusing DEJECTER (the actor) with DEJECTION (the act) or with the more familiar modern terms EJECTOR and EJECTMENT. When reading historical sources that use DEJECTER, researchers should understand they are looking at language from the Law French stratum of English legal terminology — a layer that sits between Latin legal forms and the later anglicized vocabulary of the common law. Cross-referencing with Kelham's Law French Dictionary (the source Burrill cites) is advisable when the precise context of the term is unclear in a manuscript source.
Researchers working on the history of real property actions, particularly the development of the action of ejectment out of earlier dispossession remedies, may encounter DEJECTER in tracing the lineage of those causes of action. The conceptual content maps most directly onto what later English law would call the ejector in a fictitious ejectment action, though the historical usage predates that procedural device.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this term, and its entry is spare: a Law French term, traced to the Latin *dejicere*, glossed as "to cast off, or out; to throw down," with attribution to Kelham's Law French Dictionary. Burrill provides no further doctrinal elaboration, which itself signals the term's limited technical footprint — it is a vocabulary item from the language layer of early English law rather than a term of art with developed doctrinal content.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Jacob, Tomlin, Bouvier, Black) carry this term, which reflects both its archaic character and its relatively narrow occurrence in the sources those compilers drew upon. The absence from Bouvier and Black is telling: by the time American legal lexicography was maturing in the nineteenth century, DEJECTER had been entirely displaced by the anglicized vocabulary of ejectment.
Researchers should not expect historical dictionaries to provide more than Burrill offers here. The substantive law underlying the term must be reconstructed from primary sources and from secondary works on Law French and early English real property procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
DEJECTER is an English Law French term with no independent life in American, Scottish, or civilian legal traditions. Its relevance is confined to research into English legal history, particularly the medieval and early modern periods.