Definition
In Roman law, to take something from an old law by means of a new law — that is, to partially repeal or modify an existing statute by subsequent legislation, without wholly abolishing it. The term describes legislative subtraction: a new enactment that carves away a portion of a prior law while leaving the remainder intact.
Common Confusion
Exrogare is most likely to be confused with the related Roman legislative terms derogare (to partially repeal or limit an old law), abrogare (to wholly repeal an old law), and obrogare (to pass a new law contrary to an old law, superseding it in whole or in part). These four terms form a set in Roman legislative theory. The distinctions among them matter when reading civil law treatises and commentaries that deploy the terms with precision. Because Burrill's treats exrogare and derogare as synonymous, a researcher relying solely on that source may miss whatever functional distinction existed in Roman usage. When precision is required, consulting a dedicated Roman law reference or civil law treatise is advisable rather than relying on the brief entries in American general legal dictionaries.
Why It Matters in Research
Exrogare is a term of Roman legislative theory, not a term of art in common law systems. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in treatises on civil law, comparative legal history, or works surveying Roman statutory interpretation. Its significance lies in the taxonomy it represents: Roman jurists distinguished carefully among the different ways a new law could affect an old one, and exrogare occupied a specific, bounded position in that taxonomy alongside derogare, abrogare, and obrogare. Understanding that taxonomy is essential for correctly reading primary and secondary sources that use these terms without defining them.
The term appears infrequently in American legal dictionaries and is essentially absent from case law. Its presence in Black's and Burrill's signals that nineteenth-century American legal education retained meaningful exposure to Roman law concepts, particularly in the context of statutory construction and the rules governing legislative repeal. Researchers working in the history of American statutory interpretation or tracing the civilian influence on early republic legal thought should note these dictionary entries as evidence of that intellectual inheritance.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd eds.) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in agreement on substance. All three entries define exrogare as the act of taking something from an old law by a new law — partial legislative modification, not total repeal. Burrill's is the most informative of the three: it adds the citation to Taylor's Civil Law (p. 155) and explicitly equates exrogare with derogare, noting them as synonymous.
That equivalence is the most useful datum these sources provide. In classical Roman usage, derogare was the more commonly employed term for partial repeal, while exrogare appears less frequently. Burrill's signal that the two are "the same" reflects a tradition of treating them as functionally interchangeable rather than as terms of technical distinction. Researchers should treat this equivalence with some care: classical Roman jurists sometimes used these terms with nuanced differences, and the historical dictionaries — written for American practitioners, not Roman law specialists — may compress distinctions that a civil law scholar would preserve.
Black's 2nd edition contains what appears to be a typographical error in its etymology line, giving "ea" rather than "ex" as the Latin prefix. This does not affect the substantive definition but is worth noting if the entry is cited for etymological purposes.
Jurisdictional Note
Exrogare has no operative significance in American common law or in any U.S. statutory framework. It is relevant only as a term of Roman law theory, encountered in civil law scholarship, comparative law materials, and historical legal education literature.