Definition
A term from old Scots law meaning disseisin — the wrongful dispossession of a person from their freehold land or estate. Dissasina is the Latin form used in early Scottish legal records and instruments to describe the act of unlawfully ousting a landholder from possession, equivalent in substance to the English common law concept of disseisin. The term carries no independent doctrinal content beyond what disseisin supplies; it is essentially a linguistic variant native to the Scots legal tradition and its Latin record-keeping conventions.
Common Confusion
Dissasina and disseisin describe the same underlying wrong — wrongful dispossession from freehold — but researchers must not treat them as interchangeable terms across jurisdictions. Dissasina appears in old Scots legal Latin sources and instruments; disseisin is the operative English common law term. Conflating the two traditions without attention to the source jurisdiction can produce research errors, particularly when working with medieval or early modern records that span both Scottish and English legal contexts. Additionally, dissasina should not be confused with the related Scots term dissasine, which some sources render as a variant spelling of the same concept rather than a distinct legal category.
Why It Matters in Research
Dissasina is a narrow, historically bounded term that surfaces almost exclusively in old Scots legal Latin — meaning it will appear in medieval and early modern Scottish charters, court records, and legal instruments rather than in any modern statutory or case law context. Researchers working in Scottish legal history should be alert to spelling variants: dissasina, dissasine, and dissaisine all appear in historical sources, sometimes within the same document, reflecting inconsistent Latinization of the vernacular Scots term.
The critical research trap is assuming that procedural remedies available for disseisin under English common law — most notably the assize of novel disseisin — transferred directly and identically into Scots law. Scots law developed its own remedies for wrongful dispossession, and the doctrinal architecture behind dissasina diverged from the English model. Reading English common law rules backward onto a Scottish dissasina case will produce error.
The corpus connections worth tracing are: (1) the relationship between dissasina and the Scots action of ejection; (2) the treatment of possession and dispossession in Scots institutional writers such as Stair and Erskine, who did not use the Latin form but addressed the same substance; and (3) the parallel English common law entry at DISSEISIN, which provides the conceptual framework that most Law Mind sources use as a reference point when glossing the Scots term.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in complete agreement on substance: dissasina means disseisin or dispossession in old Scots law, and all cite Skene as authority. Sir John Skene's De Verborum Significatione (1597) is the foundational Scots legal Latin glossary, and its authority on terms of this kind is well established — making the Skene citation across multiple dictionaries a meaningful convergence rather than mere copying.
Burrill is the most precise of the four, specifying the citation as Skene de Verb. Sign., which confirms that all dictionaries are drawing from the same primary source. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier offer identical short glosses with no additional analysis. None of the source dictionaries provide doctrinal elaboration, which is appropriate given the term's function as a record-keeping locution rather than a term of art with independent legal tests or elements.
What the historical dictionaries do not address — and what researchers should supply from other sources — is any account of how Scots law actually remedied dissasina, what procedural forms were available, and how the Scots treatment compared to or diverged from the English assize of novel disseisin. The dictionary record on this term stops at translation; the legal history must be pursued elsewhere.
Jurisdictional Note
Dissasina is exclusively a term of old Scots law. It has no recognized use in English common law, American law, or any modern legal system. Researchers encountering the term outside a Scottish historical context should treat it as either a copying error or a direct quotation from a Scots source.