Definition
To deprive a person of a vested right, title, authority, or estate; to take away or withdraw a property interest or power that was previously held. Devest is the functional opposite of invest: where invest delivers possession or title into a person's hands, devest removes it. The term operates primarily in property law and estate contexts, describing the process by which an already-vested interest is stripped away or extinguished — whether by operation of law, subsequent condition, or legal proceeding.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "To divest; to undress. To take away, as an authority, title, etc., to deprive; to alienate, as an estate. To be taken away, lost, or alienated, as a title or an estate."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To divest; to undress. To take away, as an authority, title, etc., to deprive; to alienate, as an estate."
The common meaning tracks the legal meaning fairly closely here, but the legal usage carries a technical precision that ordinary language does not. In law, devest specifically describes the removal of an interest that has already vested — that is, an interest with present legal force — not merely the stripping of some inchoate or future expectancy. The undress sense is obsolete and irrelevant to legal research.
Common Confusion
DEVEST vs. DIVEST: These are spelling variants of the same root concept, and historical sources treat them as interchangeable. However, the preferred legal spelling was long contested. Burrill's Law Dictionary and Black's both assert that "devest" has the support of the better legal authorities, citing Coke's Littleton. Modern legal usage has largely settled on "divest" — particularly in American courts and statutory drafting — making "devest" the historical and archaic spelling. A researcher scanning older English and early American sources will encounter "devest" where modern materials use "divest." Failure to account for this variant will produce incomplete search results.
DEVEST vs. DEFEASANCE: Devesting describes the act or event of taking away a vested interest. Defeasance describes the condition or instrument that triggers or accomplishes that result. They operate together but are not synonymous.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is the spelling divergence. Legal texts from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries — including Coke's Littleton, Hale's Analysis, and their American successors — use "devest" as the standard form. Modern American materials, including the Restatements and post-twentieth-century case reporters, default to "divest." A full search for cases and treatises on divestiture of property interests must run both terms, particularly when researching common law property rules or tracing doctrine through equity courts.
The concept itself appears across several distinct research contexts: (1) real property, where an estate may be devested by breach of condition subsequent; (2) equity and trust law, where beneficial interests may be devested by the terms of the trust instrument; (3) constitutional property law, where the question of whether a vested right has been devested without compensation engages Takings Clause analysis; and (4) jurisdictional doctrine, where a court's previously acquired jurisdiction may be said to be devested by subsequent events — a usage that persists in some American courts.
The corpus connection to VEST and VESTING is direct and essential: you cannot analyze devesting without first understanding what it means for an interest to be vested. Researchers working on condition-subsequent problems, shifting executory interests, or defeasible fees will encounter devest as a term of art describing the operative moment when the prior estate falls.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the core meaning without material disagreement. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill all define devest as the act of taking away authority, title, or estate, and all explicitly frame it as the inverse of invest. Burrill provides the most linguistically careful treatment, distinguishing old English law usage (rooted in the Law French desvester and Latin devestire) from modern usage, and explicitly vouching for "devest" over "divest" on the strength of Coke's authority.
Anderson's Law Dictionary adds nothing beyond a cross-reference to VEST — which itself signals that the term was understood primarily in relational terms, meaningful chiefly as the negation of vesting rather than as a standalone concept.
The historical sources collectively miss what modern property scholarship has developed: the distinction between interests that were never vested (and therefore could not be devested) and interests that vested subject to divestment. This distinction, central to the law of future interests and the Rule Against Perpetuities, is not articulated in the dictionary entries. Researchers should not rely on historical dictionary treatments for nuance on this point and should consult property treatises directly.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions uniformly prefer "divest" in modern practice and statutory language, though "devest" appears in older American case law and will be found in courts drawing on English common law lineage. English legal materials use "devest" through the nineteenth century. Scottish and early colonial American sources are consistent with the English pattern.