Definition
In law, elimination historically referred to the act of banishing or expelling a person, or the rejection and removal of something or someone from a legal proceeding, instrument, or body. The term appears in older English law sources primarily in connection with the physical or formal exclusion of a person — turning them out of doors, casting them off, or rejecting their participation.
In modern legal usage, elimination does not carry a single fixed technical definition. It appears most often in procedural and evidentiary contexts to describe the removal of issues, parties, claims, or evidence from consideration — as when a court eliminates a count from an indictment, or when a party eliminates a juror during voir dire. In criminal law, the phrase "elimination of suspects" describes the investigative process of ruling out individuals. In tort and products liability, "elimination of risk" language appears in negligence and design-defect analyses.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of eliminating, expelling, or throwing off; excluding a losing contestant from competition; discharging waste products physiologically; causing a quantity to disappear from a mathematical equation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of expelling or throwing off; physiologically, the discharge or excretion of waste products; mathematically, the act of causing a quantity to disappear from an equation by deducing fewer equations from several containing multiple unknowns.
The common meanings of elimination are broader and more varied than the narrow legal usage. The historical legal dictionaries fix on banishment and rejection — a specifically coercive, social act — while modern common usage includes competitive elimination (reality television, tournaments) and mathematical reduction. Researchers should be alert to the fact that "elimination" in older legal documents means expulsion or banishment of a person, not the more neutral modern sense of simply removing something from consideration.
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Common Confusion
Elimination is occasionally confused with exclusion, expulsion, and banishment, all of which describe the removal of a person from a place or status. The distinctions matter for historical research: banishment typically implies a formal judicial or sovereign command; expulsion often refers to removal from a corporate body, guild, or institution; exclusion is broader and procedural. Elimination in old English usage carried a sense of physical ejection — turning out of doors — rather than formal judicial sentence, placing it closer to expulsion than to banishment proper.
In modern usage, elimination also risks confusion with termination (ending a contract or employment) and with acquittal or dismissal (ending a legal proceeding), none of which share elimination's historical connotation of physical removal.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century English legal materials will encounter elimination used in its strict historical sense — physical expulsion or rejection of a person. This meaning is largely dormant in modern legal writing, where elimination has diffused into general procedural vocabulary without a fixed technical definition. The gap creates a real indexing hazard: a full-text search for "elimination" across a corpus spanning historical and modern sources will return results with very different operative meanings.
In criminal procedure materials, watch for elimination appearing in the context of jury selection (eliminating jurors via challenge), charging decisions (eliminating counts), and investigative procedure (eliminating suspects). These uses are modern and functional, not historically grounded in the old English banishment sense.
In civil litigation and administrative law, elimination of issues or parties through summary judgment, settlement, or stipulation is common usage — again, functionally descriptive rather than technically defined.
Researchers should also note that none of the three source dictionaries — Black's (1st), Black's (2nd), or Rapalje & Lawrence — provide a modern procedural definition. All three anchor the term in the old English expulsion sense. This means that the historical dictionaries are of limited navigational use for researchers encountering elimination in twentieth- or twenty-first-century legal texts.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in complete agreement: elimination means the act of banishing or turning out of doors, and rejection. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce substantially identical language, suggesting a shared underlying source. None of the three expand on specific legal contexts, procedures, or statutes in which the term was formally used — the entry in each source is bare, definitional, and brief.
This unanimity across dictionaries reflects the term's status as a minor technical descriptor in old English law rather than a term of art with developed doctrine. The historical dictionaries add little beyond confirming the meaning and the period. Notably, none address the mathematical or physiological senses catalogued by Webster's 1913, which were contemporaneous — suggesting that legal lexicographers were deliberately narrowing the term to its legal application rather than canvassing all usages.
What the historical sources miss entirely is the modern procedural use. Researchers should not rely on these entries when analyzing twentieth-century materials.
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Jurisdictional Note
No significant jurisdictional variation attaches to the historical legal meaning. In modern practice, procedural uses of elimination (of claims, jurors, parties) follow jurisdiction-specific procedural rules and vary accordingly, but the word itself carries no distinct jurisdictional definition — it functions descriptively within whatever procedural framework applies.
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