Definition
"Ficer" does not appear as a recognized legal term in the historical or modern legal lexicon. The source material provided under this entry heading contains text that belongs to a different entry — specifically, a fragment of the definition for **SUPPLETORY OATH** — and was apparently misfiled or mislabeled in the source index.
No entry for "ficer" appears in Anderson's Dictionary of Law as a standalone legal term. The fragment reads: *"The oath of a party, administered in order that he may furnish the measure of proof required of a fact: as, his oath to the correctness of his books of account and of the justness of the claim he makes. Its original is found in the civil law, which requires the testimony of two persons to a fact: plena probatio, full proof; the testimony of one person being semi-plena probatio..."* — this is plainly the definition of suppletory oath, not a definition of "ficer."
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Common Confusion
FICER should not be mistaken for a genuine legal term. It is an artifact. Researchers should navigate directly to the intended entry. If the source of interest is the definition fragment attached here, see SUPPLETORY OATH.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "FICER" as an index entry or headword in a digitized or compiled legal dictionary should treat it as a data artifact — most likely a truncation, OCR error, or cataloging misattribution rather than a genuine legal term. The most probable origin is a corrupted scan of an entry beginning with "OF-FICER" or a similar compound, with the leading characters dropped.
If you arrived here searching for a specific legal concept, consider the following likely candidates based on the source fragment:
- **SUPPLETORY OATH** — the actual content attached to this entry
- **OFFICER** — a term Anderson's does address, covering public officers, corporate officers, and judicial officers
- **SEMI-PLENA PROBATIO** — the civil law evidentiary concept referenced in the misattributed fragment
Researchers working with historical legal dictionaries in digitized form should be alert to OCR-generated phantom headwords. Entries near alphabetical boundaries, or those drawn from dense multi-column typeset pages, are particularly vulnerable to character-drop errors that produce nonsense headwords while correctly preserving definition text.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law contains no substantive entry under "ficer." The definition text appended to this headword in the source material is, without ambiguity, a fragment of Anderson's entry on suppletory oath — a civil law evidentiary concept governing the weight of party testimony when independent witness evidence falls short of full proof. That entry discusses the Roman law distinction between *plena probatio* (full proof, requiring two witnesses) and *semi-plena probatio* (half proof, from one witness), and the role of a party's own oath in completing the evidentiary measure required.
No other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — including Black's, Bouvier's, or Burrill's — carries a headword "ficer" as a legal term of art.
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