Definition
A judgment of a court by which a person is dispossessed of a thing or ejected from a right — effectively put out of possession by judicial decree. The term belongs to the medieval English legal vocabulary and refers both to the act of forjudging (the verb form, forisjudicare) and to the resulting judgment itself. In practice, forisjudicatio operated as a form of judicial exclusion or ouster: a party found to have no right, or to have forfeited a right, was formally put out by order of court rather than by self-help or executive action.
The term is sometimes used interchangeably with forejudgment and forjudger, reflecting the fluid Latin-French-English layering common in early common law terminology.
Common Confusion
Forisjudicatio, forejudgment, and abjudicatio are closely related but technically distinct. Forisjudicatio is the Latin form used in pleading records and formal court rolls. Forejudgment is its English-language equivalent, used in the same period to describe the same outcome. Abjudicatio, noted by Fleta as a synonym, carries a slightly narrower sense of judicial denial of a claimed right, whereas forisjudicatio emphasizes the act of putting out of possession. Researchers encountering any of these three forms in historical records should treat them as referring to the same underlying judicial mechanism, but should note the specific term used, as it may signal which tradition — Latin pleading, Norman-French practice, or early English common law — shaped the document.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a paleographic and indexing problem as much as a legal one. It appears in plea rolls, assize records, and early treatise literature under variable spellings — forisjudicatio, forejudgment, forjudgment, forjudger — and researchers relying on keyword searches will miss instances recorded under alternate forms. The Law Mind corpus may index these variants separately, so running searches under each form is advisable before concluding a term is absent from a document set.
The term's significance peaks in medieval English legal history. By the later common law period it had fallen largely out of active use, surviving mainly as a learned citation in treatise discussions of ouster, dispossession, and the history of real property remedies. Post-Tudor sources referencing forisjudicatio are almost always looking backward, citing Coke or Fleta rather than applying the doctrine themselves.
Jurisdictional note for corpus research: the term has no meaningful American legal history. Its appearances in U.S. legal dictionaries are wholesale adoptions from English sources. Researchers working in American legal contexts should treat forisjudicatio as a historical curio rather than operative doctrine, and should not expect to find it in American case law or statutory material.
The connection to forfeiture and dispossession remedies is the most productive research thread. When historical sources discuss the mechanisms by which courts stripped possession or right — rather than leaving that to trespass or ejectment actions — forisjudicatio is the doctrinal ancestor worth tracing.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries consulted are in close agreement, which itself signals that the term had settled into a fixed, received meaning by the time these dictionaries were compiled rather than being a live point of legal development.
Black's (both editions) defines it as a judgment putting a man out of possession of a thing, citing Coke on Littleton at 100b. Burrill adds the reference to Townsend's Pleas (Pl. 116) and, most usefully, flags Fleta's alternative term abjudicatio — a cross-reference the Black's entries omit. Burrill's entry is the richer of the sources here, and researchers wanting the full medieval context should treat it as the preferred starting point among the dictionary sources.
None of the dictionaries canvass the procedural mechanics of how forisjudicatio was entered or executed, nor do they distinguish between forisjudicatio in real property contexts versus personal right contexts. These gaps are typical of dictionary treatment of medieval terms — the definitions fix meaning but do not reconstruct doctrine. For fuller treatment, Coke on Littleton (the primary citation in all three sources) and Fleta remain the authoritative references.
Jurisdictional Note
Forisjudicatio is exclusively an old English law term. It has no reception in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions as operative doctrine. Its presence in American legal dictionaries reflects the encyclopedic ambitions of nineteenth-century legal lexicography rather than any practical application.