Definition
Ex dem. is an abbreviation of the Latin ex demissione, meaning "on the demise of" or "by the lease of." It appeared in the formal titles of ejectment actions at common law to identify the nominal lessor — the person in whose name the fictional lease underlying the action was said to have been granted. A typical case title took the form: Doe ex dem. Smith v. Jones, meaning the fictitious plaintiff John Doe, acting on the demise (by the supposed lease) of Smith, against Jones the defendant in possession.
The term is inseparable from the common law action of ejectment, which proceeded through an elaborate procedural fiction. Because ejectment originally lay only to recover a leasehold, plaintiffs claiming freehold title were required to allege that a fictitious lessee (conventionally "John Doe") had been put in possession by a demise from the true claimant, then ejected by the equally fictitious "Richard Roe." The real dispute was between the named lessor (ex dem.) and the defendant actually in possession, but the fiction had to be maintained in the pleadings. Ex dem. was the shorthand marker that identified the real claimant within this artifice.
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Common Confusion
Ex dem. is sometimes misread as a party designation — as though the person named after it were a plaintiff or co-plaintiff. They are neither. The named individual is the nominal lessor within a procedural fiction; the actual plaintiff of record was the fictitious John Doe. Researchers encountering case titles of the form Doe ex dem. [Name] v. [Defendant] should treat the ex dem. name as identifying the real-world claimant whose title was being litigated, not a formal party to the record in the modern sense.
Ex dem. should not be confused with ex parte, another Latin abbreviation common in case captions. Ex parte means "on one side only" and identifies proceedings where only one party appears; ex dem. is a historical artifact of ejectment pleading with no procedural meaning outside that context.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English common law reports, early American state reporters, and colonial records will encounter ex dem. frequently in case titles through the nineteenth century. Its presence is a reliable signal that the underlying action is ejectment and that a title dispute — almost always over real property — is at the heart of the case.
Several research traps deserve attention:
First, indexing. Pre-modern reporters indexed ejectment cases inconsistently. Some indexed under "Doe," some under the ex dem. name, and some under the defendant's name. A case may need to be searched under all three.
Second, jurisdictional abolition dates vary. English common law ejectment and its fictions were abolished by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852. American states abolished the action at different times, and a few retained modified forms well into the late nineteenth century. A researcher locating an ex dem. case must check whether the relevant jurisdiction had already reformed ejectment procedure before treating the case as representative of live practice.
Third, the ex dem. name identifies the actual title claimant and is therefore the name most likely to appear in deeds, surveys, probate records, and other land title documents. In historical land title research, the ex dem. name is often the most substantively useful piece of information in the case caption.
Fourth, after ejectment was abolished or reformed, the ex dem. form disappeared from new filings but remained in the titles of older reported cases that courts continued to cite as authority. A nineteenth-century opinion citing a Doe ex dem. case is not necessarily dealing with a surviving fictional-ejectment procedure; it may simply be citing real property precedent established under the old form.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies ex dem. as an abbreviation of ex demissione and notes its frequent appearance in ejectment suit titles, directing readers to law reports generally (reports passim) for illustration. Burrill's treatment is accurate but brief — consistent with the term's nature as procedural shorthand rather than a substantive doctrine requiring extended definition.
Historical dictionaries uniformly treat ex dem. as a term of art within the ejectment fiction rather than as an independent legal concept. None offer significant divergence on meaning. What the historical sources collectively underemphasize is the practical significance of the ex dem. name as the real-world identifier of the claimant whose title was at stake — information that matters greatly to anyone doing title chain or land history research rather than pure doctrinal analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
Ex dem. is a creature of English common law ejectment procedure, received into American colonial and early state practice. Its use effectively ended in England with the Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and in American jurisdictions as code pleading reforms displaced common law forms, with timing varying by state. The term has no current operative legal meaning in any common law jurisdiction.
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