Definition
In Roman and civil law, a person who has been disinherited — that is, expressly excluded from an inheritance by the testator's act. The exheres is the opposite of the heres (heir): where the heres is named to receive the estate, the exheres is named to receive nothing, and that exclusion is made formal and deliberate rather than left to silence.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating Roman law and its civilian descendants. Researchers encountering it in historical legal texts should understand that disinheritance in Roman law was a formal, legally required act — a testator could not simply omit a sui heredes (those in the testator's direct power) from a will; omission and disinheritance were legally distinct, and the failure to disinherit properly could void the will or trigger querela inofficiosi testamenti (a complaint that the will was undutiful). The exheres label therefore carried procedural weight that has no clean modern common-law analog, where omission from a will generally suffices.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should be cautious about projecting this term into common-law contexts: English and American law did not adopt the Roman requirement of formal disinheritance, so exheres and its cognates appear in historical civilian treatises, glossaries, and comparative law materials rather than in case law or statutes of common-law jurisdictions. If you encounter the term in a 19th-century American legal dictionary or treatise, it is almost certainly being used in a civilian or historical explanatory context, not as operative legal terminology.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the term sparingly: "In the civil law. One disinherited." with citation to Vicat and Du Cange — both standard reference works for medieval and Roman civil law terminology. The brevity of the entry reflects the term's status as received civilian vocabulary rather than living common-law usage. Neither the definition nor the cited sources elaborate on the procedural significance of the exheres designation within Roman inheritance law, which limits the entry's utility for researchers who need to understand why the term mattered, not merely what it denotes. No divergence exists between the sources because only one source treats the term; the absence of the term from later editions of Black's and from other major common-law dictionaries confirms its marginal place in Anglo-American legal vocabulary.