Definition
A Latin legal term from old conveyancing meaning "to demise, lease, or let" — that is, to transfer possession of property, typically through a lease or grant. The term appears most commonly in two procedural contexts: (1) as the root of the phrase *ex demissione* (abbreviated *ex dem.* or *d.*), which appeared in the title of common-law ejectment actions to identify the party on whose demise the nominal plaintiff brought suit; and (2) as the basis of the plea *non demisit*, entered in response to a claim for rent under a parol agreement, asserting that the defendant did not in fact let or lease the property in question.
Burrill distinguishes *demittere* from the closely related *dimittere* (to send away or dismiss), noting that while both derive in part from the Latin *mittere*, their legal applications diverge: *demittere* focuses on the act of transferring or leasing property, while *dimittere* carries the broader sense of releasing or parting with something entirely.
Common Confusion
DEMITTERE / DIMITTERE: These two Latin terms are easily conflated due to their near-identical spelling and shared root. In legal usage they are distinct. *Demittere* is tied to conveyancing — the letting or leasing of land. *Dimittere* relates to discharge, release, or dismissal. Burrill explicitly cross-references both, suggesting the confusion was common enough to warrant a warning even in historical practice. Researchers encountering either term in manuscript or early printed sources should check spelling carefully before drawing conclusions about the legal act described.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary reason a researcher encounters *demittere* is in the titles of old ejectment actions. The common-law action of ejectment was a fictional proceeding in which a nominal plaintiff (typically "John Doe") was said to have been ejected from land that the real claimant held by demise. The case caption reflected this fiction: *Doe ex demissione Patterson v. Winn*, for example, identified Patterson as the party whose lease (demise) grounded the action. In digests, reporters, and indexes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these captions were heavily abbreviated — *d.*, *dem.*, *ex dem.* — and a researcher unfamiliar with *demittere* and its derivatives will misread or fail to retrieve these cases entirely.
The plea *non demisit* is less frequently encountered but appears in actions for rent arising from parol (oral) leases. It is a denial of the foundational act of leasing and should be distinguished from pleas that admit the lease but contest the rent amount or the breach.
Researchers working in pre-reform common-law materials — particularly English and early American ejectment records before the procedural reforms of the mid-nineteenth century — should treat *ex demissione* captions as a signal that the actual dispute is a title or possession question dressed in the fictional clothing of ejectment. The nominal parties are irrelevant; the *ex dem.* party is the real claimant.
*Demittere* itself does not appear in modern legal usage. Its survival in the Law Mind corpus is almost entirely historical — pre-1850 case reporters, conveyancing forms, and pleading treatises. After procedural reforms abolished the fictions of ejectment, the term and its abbreviations disappeared from active use.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson and Burrill agree on the core definition — to demise, lease, or let — and both identify *ex demissione* as the primary surviving procedural trace of the term. Anderson is more practically focused, giving the abbreviation conventions (*ex dem.*, *d.*) and a sample caption, which reflects his dictionary's orientation toward working practitioners navigating real case law. Burrill goes further etymologically, tracing *demittere* to *de* + *mittere* and explicitly distinguishing it from *dimittere*, showing the care a researcher must take with these visually similar forms.
Neither source addresses the full procedural history of ejectment, which requires consulting treatises on common-law pleading for context. The fictional structure of the ejectment action — in which *demittere* played its nominal role — is better explained in works such as Blackstone's Commentaries or Stephen on Pleading than in any dictionary entry alone.