Definition
A complainant who formally exhibits, or presents, articles of the peace against another person. The exhibitant is the party who initiates proceedings by submitting a sworn complaint alleging threatened harm — specifically, that the named person poses a credible threat to their safety — and thereby seeking a court order requiring that person to keep the peace or post a security bond. The term names the complaining party in this procedural posture, distinguishing them from a general complainant or plaintiff in ordinary civil proceedings.
In broader usage, an exhibitant may refer to any person who formally exhibits or presents a document, complaint, or claim before a tribunal, though this general sense appears in the sources only incidentally.
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Common Confusion
EXHIBITANT should not be confused with EXHIBITOR, which in modern usage refers to a person or entity that displays goods, evidence, or materials (at a trade fair, in court, etc.). EXHIBITANT is a term of art tied specifically to the articles-of-the-peace procedure; exhibitor carries no such procedural meaning. Researchers encountering "exhibitor" in historical legal sources should verify context carefully, as the two words were occasionally used interchangeably by non-specialist writers, but the procedural term of art is uniformly exhibitant.
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Why It Matters in Research
EXHIBITANT is a narrow procedural label and will appear in historical sources almost exclusively in connection with articles of the peace — a now-largely-obsolete common law mechanism for preventive peace-keeping. Researchers should be alert to several navigational points:
First, the term is essentially a historical artifact. Modern American and English legal practice has replaced the articles-of-the-peace procedure with statutory protective order and harassment injunction frameworks. EXHIBITANT will not appear in contemporary case law or statutes; encounters with the term are strong signals that a source predates the mid-twentieth century.
Second, all four historical dictionary sources converge on a single citation — 12 Adolphus & Ellis 599 (an English Queen's Bench reporter from the 1830s–1840s) — without variation. This suggests the dictionaries were drawing from a single authority rather than a developed body of case law. Researchers should treat the definition as reflecting English practice of that era, not a broad common law consensus.
Third, Rapalje & Lawrence extends the term slightly, noting its general sense ("a person who exhibits anything") and appending, in the same entry, a note about "existence by actual birth" in Texas infanticide statutes. This appears to be an editorial accident of proximity in the original dictionary rather than a substantive connection to EXHIBITANT. Do not import that Texas statutory material into research on exhibitants.
Fourth, corpus researchers working in equity or ecclesiastical court records may encounter EXHIBITANT in bill-and-answer proceedings, where a party "exhibiting" a bill was the party initiating the complaint. This usage overlaps with but is not identical to the articles-of-the-peace sense.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence — define EXHIBITANT identically as a complainant in articles of the peace, and all cite the same English reporter. There is no meaningful divergence among them on substance, which reflects the term's narrow and stable procedural meaning rather than any independent corroboration.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source to acknowledge the broader sense ("a person who exhibits anything"), signaling that the term was understood to have a logical plain-English extension even if its operative legal function was confined to the peace-bond context.
None of the historical sources explain the underlying procedure of articles of the peace in any depth, making the dictionary entries thin without supplementary research into that parent mechanism. Researchers needing the full procedural picture should consult historical treatises on preventive justice, such as Dalton's Countrey Justice or Blackstone's Commentaries, Book IV.
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Jurisdictional Note
The articles-of-the-peace procedure — and thus the term EXHIBITANT — originated in English common law and was carried into American colonial and early state practice. Use and retention of the procedure varied significantly by state, with some jurisdictions codifying and modernizing it while others allowed it to fall into disuse. The term is unlikely to have consistent meaning across American jurisdictions after the early nineteenth century.
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