Definition
A person who has been prosecuted as an outlaw; one subjected to the legal process of outlawry. The term denotes the individual against whom outlawry proceedings have been brought, placing them outside the ordinary protections of the law. Under historical English common law, a person declared an outlaw forfeited the shield of legal rights — they could not sue in court, their property was subject to forfeiture, and in the most severe applications, they could be treated as beyond the law's protection entirely.
Common Confusion
Exlegalitus is easily conflated with utlagatus, the Latin term for an outlaw — that is, a person already declared to be outside the law's protection. The distinction is procedural: exlegalitus refers to the person in the process of being prosecuted as an outlaw, while utlagatus denotes the status once that process has concluded with a declaration of outlawry. In practice, historical records do not always honor this distinction, and the terms may appear interchangeably in non-technical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Exlegalitus is a term of almost entirely historical significance. Researchers will encounter it only in pre-modern English legal sources, medieval records, or treatises discussing the common law of outlawry. It has no operative meaning in modern legal systems, which abolished outlawry as a legal mechanism.
The term is a useful index word when searching historical corpus materials related to outlawry proceedings, attainder, and the stripping of legal status. Researchers should note that exlegalitus describes the subject of the proceeding — the person prosecuted — not the outcome or the legal status itself (which would be captured by terms like "outlaw" or "utlagatus"). This distinction matters when reading historical records that may use the terms loosely or interchangeably.
Because the term appears primarily through Jacob's Law Dictionary as transmitted into Black's, its presence in a source document is itself a signal: materials using exlegalitus are likely drawing on English common law tradition, and researchers should orient their analysis accordingly toward English rather than civil law frameworks.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary reproduce the definition in nearly identical form — "he who is prosecuted as an outlaw" — with attribution to Jacob's Law Dictionary. The entries are essentially identical across editions, suggesting no meaningful doctrinal evolution occurred between printings and that Black's was transmitting rather than developing the definition.
The brevity of both entries reflects the term's narrow technical function. Neither edition elaborates on the legal consequences that attached to exlegalitus status, the procedural mechanisms by which outlawry was prosecuted, or the distinctions between exlegalitus and related terms such as utlagatus (the outlaw himself, once declared). Researchers relying solely on Black's will find the definition a starting point only. Fuller treatment of outlawry procedure and its consequences must be sought in sources such as Blackstone's Commentaries or Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, both of which address outlawry in substantive detail.