Definition
A Latin legal term meaning "to do" or "to make." Efacere appears in medieval and early modern legal texts as a verb root joining with nouns to form compound phrases describing acts required of parties in legal proceedings. The term functions less as a standalone legal concept than as a grammatical building block in Latin legal formulae, where it signals an obligation or performance — something a party must do or make in the context of a legal process.
Common compound forms include:
- Facere defaltam — to make default; to fail to appear or answer
- Facere duellum — to make or do battle; to submit to trial by combat
- Facere finem — to make or pay a fine
- Facere legem — to make one's law; to establish proof by compurgation or oath-helpers
- Facere sacramentum — to make oath; to swear
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter efacere and its companion phrases almost exclusively in medieval plea rolls, Year Books, and early treatises such as Glanvill and Bracton. The term does not appear in modern statutory or case law, making it a marker of historical source material rather than living doctrine.
The practical research trap is treating the compound phrases as interchangeable synonyms for their modern equivalents. They are not. Facere legem, for example, describes compurgation — a procedure abolished in England in 1833 — not any modern form of proof-making. Facere duellum refers to trial by battle, not arbitration or any adversarial process in the modern sense. Reading these phrases without awareness of the abolished procedures they describe will produce fundamental misunderstandings of what the historical record shows a party was required to do.
When these phrases appear in transcriptions or translations of medieval records, researchers should verify whether they are working from a Latin original, a Law French adaptation, or a later English gloss, as each layer introduces the possibility of interpretive drift. Compound phrases built on facere/efacere were formulaic, and scribal variation in spelling — including alternate forms such as facere, facere, and occasional elision of the prefix — may affect searchability in digitized corpus sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) treats efacere as a pure cross-reference entry, using it as the header to introduce the family of facere compounds rather than defining a discrete doctrine. The entry lists five compound phrases with brief English glosses. This is the standard approach across historical legal dictionaries for Latin grammatical roots: the root itself is defined minimally, and the substantive content resides in the compound phrases.
Black's does not address the procedural context of the abolished practices embedded in these phrases — a significant gap for any researcher using the entry as a starting point. The glosses are accurate as far as they go, but they strip away the procedural scaffolding that gives each phrase meaning. Facere finem, for example, sounds like a simple payment obligation in Black's gloss; in practice, the fine was often a compromise composition terminating litigation, with consequences for future claims that the bare gloss does not capture.
No other major historical legal dictionary in the standard reference shelf substantially elaborates on efacere as a headword. The substantive entries for each compound phrase, where they exist, appear under their own headings.