Definition
One who disinherits another, or who wrongfully dispossesses another person of their freehold or inheritance. The term designates the active party in an act of disinheritance or dispossession — the person doing the displacing, not the one displaced.
The term is archaic and appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources. It has no operative function in modern law, where the acts it once described are addressed through the law of wills, intestate succession, and property.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A disinheritor.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who puts another out of his inheritance.
The common and legal meanings here are essentially coextensive, but the legal sources add a dimension the common definitions omit: Bouvier specifically notes dispossession from a freehold, not merely exclusion from a testamentary gift. The legal term thus carried a property-law connotation beyond simple disinheritance by will.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter DISHERITOR almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century common law materials, law French digests, and early American legal dictionaries that drew on English sources. The term surfaces in contexts involving feudal land tenure and the wrongful ouster of an heir from a freehold estate — a concern that animated much of early property law but dissolved as fee simple ownership and statutory succession regimes displaced feudal land relationships.
The key research trap: do not read DISHERITOR as a synonym for a testator who cuts an heir out of a will. The Bouvier definition tethers the term to freehold dispossession, suggesting an act with tortious or quasi-criminal overtones, not merely a testamentary choice. A researcher finding the term in an old pleading or treatise should ask whether the context involves active ouster from land, not just exclusion from inheritance.
The term also flags its own obsolescence. Bouvier marks it "Obsolete," and Rapalje & Lawrence do not elaborate further. Its appearance in a source is therefore itself evidence of the age and tradition of that source. When tracing the development of disinheritance doctrine or the law of heirs, DISHERITOR is a waypoint rather than a working concept — useful for understanding how earlier law framed the problem, not for applying current doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence are in basic agreement: DISHERITOR is one who puts another out of an inheritance or freehold. The sources diverge only in emphasis. Bouvier's definition is the richer of the two, explicitly flagging the freehold element and marking the term obsolete — editorial judgments that Rapalje & Lawrence do not replicate, offering only the stripped-down agent-noun definition. Webster's 1913 tracks the Rapalje & Lawrence phrasing almost exactly, suggesting that by the late nineteenth century the term had migrated from active legal vocabulary into the general dictionary as a historical artifact.
None of the sources explain the precise legal mechanism by which a disheritor acted — whether by deed, by legal proceeding, or by self-help — and none situate the term within a specific common law action. Researchers seeking that procedural context will need to look beyond dictionary sources to treatises on real property and the older forms of action.
Jurisdictional Note
The term originates in English common law and carries no distinct American doctrinal development. Its appearance in early American sources reflects wholesale borrowing from English legal vocabulary rather than any independent American legal usage.