Definition
In civil law, a person who has been disinherited — that is, formally excluded from an inheritance to which they would otherwise be entitled by law or by the natural expectation of succession. The term denotes the status of one who has been exheredated (formally cut off) by a testator, typically a parent, through an explicit act in a will or testamentary instrument. The exhjeres receives nothing from the estate of the person who disinherited them, notwithstanding any familial relationship that would ordinarily give rise to a right or expectation of inheritance.
Common Confusion
Exhjeres should not be confused with an heir who simply receives nothing under a will because the estate passed entirely to others — that is a pretermitted or omitted heir, whose exclusion may be unintentional and who may retain legal remedies. The exhjeres, by contrast, has been deliberately and expressly excluded. The distinction matters for civil law analysis because the act of exheredation carried formal requirements; a legally defective exheredation could render the will invalid or subject to challenge under the querela inofficiosi testamenti (complaint of an undutiful will).
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in civil law contexts and in scholarship engaging Roman law, canon law, or early Louisiana, Quebec, and Spanish colonial legal materials. Researchers working in Anglo-American common law sources will rarely encounter it outside of historical comparative discussions, because English common law never developed the Roman concept of forced heirship in the same formal way — a testator in common law jurisdictions could simply omit an heir without triggering the formal machinery that made exheredation a distinct legal act.
The primary research trap is anachronism: the civil law concept of exheredation carries technical requirements drawn from Roman law (Justinian's Institutes and Digest address it at length), and those requirements do not map cleanly onto modern disinheritance under civil law jurisdictions that have since reformed their forced heirship rules. Researchers using historical Louisiana or Spanish colonial legal sources should be attentive to whether the source is applying Roman law rules directly, Spanish adaptations, or post-codification civil law.
The term also appears in ecclesiastical and canon law materials, particularly in discussions of succession to benefices and church property, where the underlying Roman law vocabulary persisted long after secular law had diverged.
The Black's 2nd Edition Supplemental entry for this term is sparse — a single-sentence definition with references to Vicat and Du Cange — which signals that even nineteenth-century American legal lexicography treated this as a term of art requiring recourse to specialized civil law dictionaries rather than domestic case law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental defines exhjeres simply as, in the civil law, "one disinherited," with citations to Vicat (Vocabularium Juris Utriusque) and Du Cange (Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis) — both foundational reference works for Roman and medieval Latin legal terminology. The brevity of the entry is itself informative: Black's treats this as a term belonging to the civilian tradition and does not attempt to connect it to American common law doctrine.
Vicat's and Du Cange's glossaries, referenced here, are the appropriate primary shelf sources for tracing the term's technical meaning through Roman, medieval, and early modern civil law usage. Researchers needing more than the definitional baseline will need to move from Black's to those civilian sources, or to treatises on Roman succession law.
No substantive divergence exists among available sources because only one dictionary entry is present; the definition is uncontested and narrow.
Jurisdictional Note
The concept has practical modern relevance primarily in civil law jurisdictions retaining forced heirship rules (Louisiana, Quebec, and various civil law nations), where a testator's attempt to exclude a protected heir must still satisfy formal legal requirements. In common law jurisdictions, the term is essentially a historical and comparative law artifact.