Definition
A person who ejects, dispossesses, or removes another from possession of land or property. In classical common law procedure, the term carries a more technical meaning tied to the action of ejectment:
1. Generally: Any person who wrongfully or forcibly puts another out of possession of real property.
2. Casual ejector: The fictional nominal defendant in the old common law action of ejectment. By a legal fiction peculiar to that action, the casual ejector was a made-up person who was said to have come upon the premises by accident and to have ousted the plaintiff's fictional lessee. The casual ejector had no real existence; the device was a procedural workaround that transformed what was actually a title dispute into a possessory action, which the common law courts could more readily hear.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who ejects or dispossesses another; also a mechanical device — the component of a firearm that expels spent cartridge cases; an ejector seat in an aircraft; a jet pump for moving fluids.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who ejects or dispossesses; a jet pump for lifting water or withdrawing air; an ejector condenser in a steam engine.
The common meanings are not wrong as far as they go — the legal "ejector" does eject someone — but the ordinary reader would miss the term's central significance entirely. In legal sources, "ejector" is almost never a real person performing a real act. It is a procedural fiction: a phantom defendant invented to give courts jurisdiction over land title disputes that they could not hear directly. The mechanical and aviation senses of the word are irrelevant to legal research.
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Common Confusion
EJECTOR and EJECTMENT are closely linked but distinct. Ejectment is the action or proceeding; the ejector is one of the fictional characters who populates it. Researchers encountering "ejector" in historical pleadings should resist reading it as a description of actual conduct. The casual ejector — often named in older English forms as "Richard Roe" — was universally understood to be a legal fiction, and courts would not permit defendants to deny his existence or challenge his supposed trespass.
Separately, do not confuse EJECTOR with EJECT as an entry in some historical dictionaries. Anderson's Dictionary of Law cross-references "ejector" to "eject" and pivots immediately into a discussion of election — a different concept entirely. This appears to be an editorial anomaly in Anderson's, not a meaningful legal connection between the terms.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term "ejector" almost exclusively signals historical common law procedure. By the time American legal practice consolidated in the nineteenth century, the action of ejectment and its fictional characters were already being phased out or simplified by procedural reform. The Field Code (New York, 1848) and subsequent code pleading reforms eliminated the need for the casual ejector fiction by allowing direct actions to recover real property. Researchers working in pre-reform materials — colonial records, early republic pleadings, English chancery and common law reports — will encounter ejector as a live procedural term. Researchers working in twentieth-century materials almost certainly will not.
The key trap: historical sources describing the "casual ejector" are not describing misconduct by a real party. They are describing a jurisdictional workaround. If you are reading a treatise or case report and the ejector has a suspiciously generic English name (John Doe, Richard Roe, William Stiles), you are looking at the fiction in action. The real dispute is about title, not about the ejector's conduct.
Corpus connections: "Ejector" links tightly to ejectment, which links to the broader questions of real property title, the writ system, and the transition to code pleading. Researchers interested in how courts resolved title disputes before modern procedure will need to understand the entire architecture of the fictional action — lessor of the plaintiff, casual ejector, consent rule — to make sense of the primary sources.
Jurisdictional variation in historical sources is real but patterned: English practice exported the fiction to the American colonies, where it was adopted with modest local variation. Some states retained ejectment actions longer than others after code pleading reforms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed.) gives the most useful entry, correctly identifying the ejector as one who dispossesses another and then providing a specific, accurate sub-definition of the casual ejector as the nominal fictional defendant, citing Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 208). That citation is sound; Blackstone's treatment of the action of ejectment in Book III is the standard explanatory source for this fiction in the Anglo-American tradition.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law is unhelpful here. The entry for ejector appears to redirect to "eject" and then pivots entirely to "election" — a different legal concept. This is almost certainly an editorial or typographical problem in Anderson's organization, not a substantive claim that ejector and election are related. Researchers should not read legal significance into that redirect.
Neither source addresses the post-reform obsolescence of the term, which is the most practically important thing to know. Both sources were written while the fictional action of ejectment was still within living legal memory, and neither flags that the term would become largely archaic for practicing lawyers.
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Jurisdictional Note
The casual ejector fiction was a creature of English common law procedure exported to American colonial courts. After code pleading reforms swept through American jurisdictions beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the fiction became obsolete in most U.S. states. Some jurisdictions retained the label "ejectment" for the direct possessory action even after abandoning the fictional pleading machinery; in those contexts, "ejector" simply means the person who wrongfully dispossessed the plaintiff.
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