Definition
A Latin legal term from old English law meaning to outlaw a person — that is, to formally deprive them of the benefit and protection of the law. To exlegare someone was to place them outside the legal order entirely, stripping them of the rights and safeguards that the law extended to ordinary subjects. The process rendered the outlaw effectively without legal personhood: they could not sue, could not claim the law's protection against harm done to them, and in the most severe applications were treated as civilly dead and exposed to seizure or worse by any who encountered them.
The term is a Latinized form used in medieval English legal records and treatises to describe the act of pronouncing outlawry, distinguishing the formal judicial or sovereign act from the status it produced.
Common Confusion
EXLEGARE should not be confused with the resulting status of the person outlawed, which was described by terms such as UTLAGATUS (outlaw) or the condition of being UTLAGARY. Exlegare names the act; utlagary names the consequence. Researchers occasionally encounter these terms used loosely in historical sources, but the distinction matters when tracing the procedural mechanics of outlawry in early English records.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal materials — Year Books, early plea rolls, and Latin-language treatises and glossaries — rather than in modern case law or statute. Its practical abolition was effected by St. 7 Wm. IV and 1 Vict. c. 80 (1837), which ended outlawry as a civil process, so researchers should not expect to find exlegare employed in sources after the early Victorian period.
The primary research trap is treating exlegare as interchangeable with related but distinct concepts. Outlawry in English law was both a civil and a criminal mechanism at different periods and in different courts. Exlegare in early sources may refer to the act as performed in different jurisdictions — the county court, the royal courts, or ecclesiastical contexts — and the procedural requirements and consequences varied. A researcher relying on a glossary entry alone may miss that the term's practical meaning shifted considerably between the Anglo-Norman period and the Tudor era.
Because this is a term of art specific to English legal history, American legal sources will not use it operatively. It appears in American law dictionaries only as a historical reference. Researchers working in colonial American records should look instead for English-derived outlawry procedures transplanted in modified forms, none of which will typically use the Latin term.
Law Mind corpus researchers should treat any appearance of exlegare as a marker pointing toward early English common law materials and should cross-reference with related entries on outlawry and civil death to reconstruct the fuller doctrinal context.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries converge closely on the core definition. All three identify exlegare as old English law Latin for the act of outlawing and define it substantively as depriving a person of the benefit and protection of the law. Burrill's provides the most scholarly gloss, supplying the explanatory Latin phrase exuere aliquem beneficio legis (to strip someone of the benefit of the law) and attributing the term to Spelman — a reference to Sir Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaeologicum, a standard authority for medieval English legal Latin. Both editions of Black's repeat the Spelman attribution and the same explanatory phrase, with the first edition's entry adding the critical historical note that the practice was abolished by the 1837 statute.
None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on procedural details, the distinction between civil and criminal outlawry, or the term's evolution across centuries of English legal history. Researchers seeking that depth must go beyond dictionary sources to Spelman's Glossarium directly or to historical treatments of outlawry in works such as Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law.
Jurisdictional Note
Exlegare is specific to English legal history. It has no operative meaning in modern English law following the 1837 abolition of civil outlawry, and it was never adopted as a term of art in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Its appearance in any source is a reliable signal that the material is pre-Victorian English in origin or derivation.