Definition
A Latin term from old pleading practice meaning to wait, stay, abide, pause, stop, or rest. In the context of common law pleading, demorari carried the specific technical sense of demurring — that is, pausing the action to challenge the legal sufficiency of the opposing party's pleading without disputing its facts. The phrase moratur in lege, a closely related construction, meant that a party rests or abides in law, signaling a formal demurrer.
The term itself is the infinitive form; demoratur is the conjugated third-person singular, meaning "he demurs" or "he rests in law." The French equivalents — demorer, demorier, demourier — carried the broader sense of remaining, dwelling, or residing, and appear in Law French pleading texts with both the technical procedural meaning and the more general sense of physical presence or abode.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard English entry. The word does not appear in modern general dictionaries and has no common English usage.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word. The root morari and its derivatives appear in Latin dictionaries meaning to delay, linger, or remain.
The gap here is not between common and legal meaning — it is between the word's Latin root sense (simply to wait or linger) and its precise technical function in common law pleading, where demorari meant to formally invoke a demurrer. A researcher encountering the word in a period source should not read it as mere delay or hesitation but as a signal of a specific procedural act.
Common Confusion
Demorari is frequently encountered only in Latin pleading formulas and glossaries, where it sits beside morari (to delay) and demoratus (having stayed). Researchers may conflate demorari with ordinary delay-related Latin terms. The critical distinction is procedural: in pleading contexts, demorari specifically marks the act of demurring — a party's formal legal pause challenging the sufficiency of the opposing pleading — rather than any generic postponement or continuance. It should not be read as synonymous with dilatory, prorogation, or continuance terms that appear nearby in old pleading texts.
Why It Matters in Research
Demorari is a term a researcher will encounter in transcriptions of old common law pleadings, Latin formula books, and glossaries of pleading terms — not in modern case law or statutes. Its significance is entirely historical and linguistic.
The primary research trap is reading demorari as procedural delay in the modern sense when the source text is using it as a term of art for demurrer practice. In old plea rolls and treatises on common law pleading, the distinction between delaying a matter and formally demurring to it was legally consequential. A party who demurred was not merely stalling — they were making a specific legal argument that their opponent's pleading was defective on its face.
The Law French variants (demorer, demorier, demourier) create a secondary trap. In Law French sources, these words sometimes appear in non-pleading contexts meaning simply to reside or remain — as in the Burrill fragment "pur suffrer eux demorer a lour mesons" (for suffering them to stay in their houses). Researchers working across Latin and Law French sources for the same term must attend to context carefully: the word's meaning shifts depending on whether it appears in a pleading formula or a substantive legal text about residence or physical presence.
Connections within the Law Mind corpus run primarily through demurrer practice and the mechanics of common law pleading. Stephen's Principles of Pleading (cited in Burrill as Steph. Pl. 44) and Termes de la Ley are the period reference points Burrill himself draws on, and both are relevant starting places for understanding the procedural environment in which demorari operated.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source dictionary for this entry and handles the term well within its scope. Burrill correctly identifies the dual lineage — Latin demorari and Law French demorer — and correctly flags the pleading-specific technical meaning alongside the broader residential/locational meaning of the French variants. The citation to Stephen's Pleading and Termes de la Ley grounds the entry in period authority.
What Burrill does not address, and what historical dictionaries generally leave unexplored, is the procedural mechanics behind the formula. The entry treats demorari as a glossary item rather than situating it within the broader structure of demurrer practice — what moratur in lege actually meant as a pleading event, when it was required, and what consequences followed. Researchers needing that context must move beyond the dictionary to treatises on common law pleading.
No other major historical dictionaries — not Black's, not Bouvier's, not Tomlin's — carry a dedicated entry for demorari. The term appears, when it appears at all, only as a sub-entry or cross-reference under demurrer.
Jurisdictional Note
Demorari belongs entirely to the old common law pleading system and has no living jurisdictional application. It is relevant primarily to English common law sources prior to the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century, though American sources adopting common law pleading forms used the same Latin vocabulary through the early republic.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Demurrer; Common Law Pleading; Law French