Definition
ELE is a historical abbreviation appearing in old English legal manuscripts and digests as a compressed form of ELECTIO (Latin: election, choice). In legal contexts, it signals a passage concerning the doctrine of election — the principle that a party who has the right to choose between two inconsistent legal positions, remedies, or benefits must make a binding choice and is thereafter held to it.
The abbreviation appears in close proximity to related terms such as ELEEMOSYNARY in Burrill's arrangement, reflecting the alphabetical compression common in digest-style legal dictionaries of the nineteenth century and earlier. Researchers encountering "ELE" in marginalia, case digests, or older treatise indexes should treat it as a pointer to ELECTIO or ELECTION rather than as a standalone term of art.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): ELE — Initialism of "extinction level event," used in popular science, disaster fiction, and internet culture to describe a catastrophic event capable of wiping out a species or civilization.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry for ELE as an independent word. The root "elect" and its derivatives (election, elective) appear, carrying their ordinary senses of choosing or selecting.
Editorial note: The gap here is significant for database research. A full-text search of legal corpora for "ELE" will return primarily the popular-science initialism in modern sources and the Latin abbreviation in historical sources. Neither usage overlaps with the other, and neither connects to the legal doctrine of election without additional context. Researchers should not rely on "ELE" as a search term when building a corpus around the doctrine of election.
Common Confusion
ELE (abbreviation) is easily confused with three distinct referents depending on source date and context:
1. ELECTIO — the Latin term for election or choice, the most likely legal referent in historical sources.
2. ELEEMOSYNARY — appearing immediately adjacent in Burrill's alphabetical sequence, creating a risk of misattribution when entries are partially transcribed or indexed.
3. ELE (extinction level event) — the modern initialism, wholly unrelated to legal doctrine, which will appear as noise in digital corpus searches spanning modern and historical materials.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is navigational and cautionary.
First, alphabetical adjacency in Burrill and similar nineteenth-century digests means that the fragment "ELE" in a partially legible manuscript, index card, or OCR-processed scan may represent the beginning of ELECTIO, ELECTION, or ELEEMOSYNARY. Context — particularly the presence of the maxim "Electio est interna, libera et spontanea separatio unius rei ab alia, sine compulsione, consistens in animo et voluntate" — confirms the election meaning. This maxim (election is an internal, free, and spontaneous separation of one thing from another, without compulsion, residing in the mind and will) is the doctrinal core of the election principle as stated in Coke on Littleton and echoed throughout common law equity practice.
Second, Law Mind corpus researchers running automated or keyword searches across mixed-era legal materials should flag "ELE" as a high-noise abbreviation. Proximity filtering — searching for "ELE" within a defined character window of "ctio," "ction," or "emosynary" — will substantially improve precision.
Third, the doctrine signaled by ELECTIO has genuine research depth: it underlies the equitable doctrine of election in wills and trusts (a beneficiary cannot take under an instrument and also defeat it), the common law rule against splitting remedies, and the procedural concept of election of remedies. Each of these lines of authority is traceable through sources citing Coke on Littleton 94a and Fleta, lib. 2, c. 23 — the very authorities Burrill cites in this passage.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats ELE as an entry fragment bridging ELECTIO and ELEEMOSYNARY, using the space to embed the foundational Latin maxim defining election as an internal, voluntary act of will. This is characteristic of Burrill's method: he uses transitional fragments to preserve doctrinal maxims that might otherwise fall between full entries.
The maxim itself — traceable to Co. Litt. 94a and Fleta — reflects the classical common law position that election is a mental act completed by outward manifestation, not a mechanical procedural step. This framing matters: it shaped equity's treatment of election in wills, where courts asked not merely what a party did but what they understood themselves to be choosing.
What Burrill does not provide here, and what researchers must seek elsewhere, is any treatment of the procedural consequences of election or its modern statutory forms. Nineteenth-century dictionaries generally treat election as a substantive doctrine; twentieth-century procedural reforms (particularly the merger of law and equity) substantially altered how election of remedies operates in practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: ELECTION (LAW); ELEEMOSYNARY; ELECTIO (Latin Maxims)