Definition
An elisor is a person appointed by a court to perform certain ministerial functions — most commonly to summon and return a panel of jurors, or to serve a writ — when the officers ordinarily charged with those duties (the sheriff and the coroner) are disqualified, unavailable, or have a conflict of interest. Courts typically appoint two elisors jointly, often from among court clerks or other suitable county residents, who are then sworn and act in the place of the disqualified officer. Their return of a jury panel is treated as final; no challenge to the elisors themselves is permitted once properly appointed.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person appointed by a court for certain acts, such as to return a jury or serve a writ when the sheriff and the coroners are disqualified.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An elector or chooser; one of two persons appointed by a court to return a jury or serve a writ when the sheriff and the coroners are disqualified.
Editorial note: Unusually, the common-language definitions here track the legal meaning closely because the word never migrated into general usage. The term is pure legal vocabulary with no independent life in ordinary English. The Webster's entry is essentially a legal definition dressed in dictionary form, not a lay usage.
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Why It Matters in Research
Elisor appears rarely in modern American practice — most jurisdictions have absorbed the function into statute or court rule under different terminology — but it surfaces with some regularity in older reported cases, particularly in challenges to jury composition or writs of venire facias. Researchers encountering the term in nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century opinions should understand that its invocation signals a procedural irregularity: something disqualified both the sheriff and the coroner, and the court had to reach for an extraordinary backstop.
The key research trap is treating elisor as merely synonymous with "special jury commissioner" or "jury officer." The distinction matters: an elisor's appointment is triggered specifically by the dual disqualification of the sheriff and coroner, and the finality rule — no challenge to the elisors' return — is a distinctive procedural feature that does not apply to ordinary jury commissioners or court-appointed officers generally. An opinion that turns on the finality of a jury panel may depend critically on whether an elisor, properly appointed, made the return.
Jurisdictional variation in the historical corpus is significant. English common law developed the elisor as a safety valve within the sheriff-coroner-elisor sequence. American states received this doctrine unevenly. Some codified it; others allowed it to lapse as the office of coroner became less central to civil process. Researchers using pre-1900 state reporters should check whether the jurisdiction had a functional coroner's office handling civil process at the relevant time — in jurisdictions where the coroner's civil-process role had already atrophied, the elisor appointment sequence may appear in distorted or truncated form.
Corpus connections: elisor questions tend to arise in the same cases that present challenges to array (challenges to the entire jury panel), so the term often co-appears with venire facias, challenge to the array, and return of panel. A case index search on elisor alone will undercount relevant material; paired searches with venire and challenge to array will recover more.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the most complete available historical definition: an elector chosen by a court to return a panel of jurors where both the sheriff and the coroner are disqualified. Anderson captures the important procedural feature that two elisors act jointly, that they name the jury "indifferently" (that is, impartially, without favoritism to either party), and that their return is final with no challenge permitted to their conduct. The word "indifferently" is itself a term of art in this context — it signals the same impartiality requirement imposed on the sheriff in ordinary jury returns.
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary track Anderson closely, which reflects the term's stable, narrow meaning rather than any independent lexicographical development. None of the standard historical dictionaries expand on what disqualification triggers the appointment, how the court selects the two persons, or what happens if the elisors themselves are challenged before appointment — gaps that matter for litigants in historical cases but are outside the dictionary function.
What the historical sources collectively do not address is the American statutory overlay. By the late nineteenth century, many American jurisdictions had enacted jury statutes that modified or displaced the common-law elisor procedure. Researchers should not assume that the common-law doctrine described in Anderson operated unchanged in any given American state after that state's legislature addressed jury selection by statute.
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Jurisdictional Note
The elisor derives from English common law and was received into American practice, but its continued vitality varies sharply by state. Jurisdictions that retained an active coroner with civil-process functions preserved the elisor appointment sequence longest. States that stripped the coroner of civil duties by statute often left the elisor doctrine as a historical artifact with no operative role. Modern federal practice has no direct equivalent; disqualification of the marshal is handled by court rule rather than through the elisor mechanism.
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