Definition
"Der" is not a recognized legal term. The source material retrieved under this headword consists of misfiled or corrupted index entries belonging to other terms — specifically, fragments relating to CHALDRON (a unit of coal measurement), FORMEDON IN THE REMAINDER (a writ of real action), DEPONENT/DEPOSITION (sworn testimony), and LIMITATION (restriction of an estate). None of these fragments define or reference a legal term "der."
No established common law, civil law, or statutory legal concept carries this designation in English-language legal usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "der" as an apparent headword in digitized historical legal dictionaries should treat it as an indexing or OCR artifact, not a substantive entry. Optical character recognition errors in scanned legal texts frequently produce truncated or misattributed headwords, particularly where entries begin with capital letters that are damaged, faded, or ambiguously rendered in the original print. "Der" may represent the tail end of a longer term — such as FORMEDON IN THE REMAINDER, CHALDRON, DEPONENT, or LENDER — that was split across a page or column boundary during digitization.
If you encountered "der" in a Law Mind corpus search, the productive next step is to examine the surrounding context in the source document and cross-reference against the full headwords of the entries whose fragments appear above.
Historical Dictionary Support
The seven source dictionaries consulted contain no entry for "der" as a standalone legal term. The fragments retrieved are identifiable as portions of legitimate entries:
— The coal-measurement passage (twelve sacks, three bushels, approximately a ton and a half; the Welsh reckoning of 12 barrels to the chaldron) belongs to CHALDRON, a historical unit of dry measure used in coal trading and occasionally relevant in commercial and admiralty contexts.
— The writ passage (formedon lying where lands are given for life or in tail with remainder, and the remainderman is kept out by a stranger) belongs to FORMEDON IN THE REMAINDER, as confirmed by both Bouvier and Black's, with Bouvier citing Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and Littleton.
— The deponent/deposition fragment from Burrill belongs to DEPOSE or DEPONENT.
— The limitation passage from Bouvier belongs to LIMITATION (of estates).
None of these sources treat "der" as a headword. The appearance of these fragments under this label is a retrieval or encoding error, not historical legal usage.