Definition
An archaic legal term meaning to deprive, expel, or dispossess a person by judicial judgment; to condemn someone to a penalty or to oust them from a right, office, or privilege through the force of a court's decree. All three source dictionaries treat FORJUDGE as a variant spelling directing the reader to FOREJUDGE, where the substantive definition is developed. The two spellings are interchangeable in historical sources, with FOREJUDGE the more commonly encountered form.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To exclude, oust, or dispossess by a judgment; to prohibit from something; to condemn judicially to a penalty.
The gap between common and legal meaning is minimal here — the Wiktionary definition accurately captures the legal sense. The more important caution is that the word has no meaningful presence in modern ordinary English at all. Encountering it outside a legal or historical context is rare enough that a reader may not recognize it as a legal term of art with procedural consequences rather than mere rhetorical flourish.
Common Confusion
FORJUDGE and FORJURER are neighboring entries in Bouvier and share a similar prefix and historical context, but they are distinct. FORJURER (Law French) means to abjure or forswear — a sworn renunciation, often of the realm itself. FORJUDGE is a judicial act imposed from without; FORJURER is a vow or declaration made by the party. Researchers scanning Old French or Law Latin sources should not conflate these. Additionally, the spelling variation between FORJUDGE and FOREJUDGE occasionally causes indexing gaps in older digests; a search on one form may not surface entries filed under the other.
Why It Matters in Research
This term matters primarily as a navigational problem. All three source dictionaries are cross-references, not substantive entries — meaning researchers who encounter FORJUDGE in a historical document and look it up here will be redirected to FOREJUDGE without finding a definition on the same page. Law Mind corpus researchers should treat FORJUDGE as a finding aid pointing to FOREJUDGE and conduct primary analysis there.
The term surfaces in medieval and early modern English legal records, particularly in contexts involving disbarment or expulsion of attorneys from court, forfeiture of office, and ouster proceedings. Because Law French orthography was inconsistent, the same source document may spell the word differently across its pages. Any corpus search for this term should run variants: forejudge, forjudge, foregive, and their Latin equivalents (forejudicium, forejudicatus).
Bouvier's side entry for FORJURER is a useful reminder that the FOR- / FORE- prefix cluster in Law French covers conceptually related but procedurally distinct acts — judicial condemnation versus personal abjuration. A researcher building a conceptual map of medieval English outlawry, abjuration, or expulsion from the realm should trace both strands.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionaries treat FORJUDGE as a pure cross-reference with no independent definition. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier agree completely on this point, which itself is instructive: by the time these dictionaries were compiled, FORJUDGE had been fully absorbed into FOREJUDGE as a spelling variant rather than surviving as a distinct term with independent usage.
Bouvier's entry is the only one to add marginal value by pairing FORJUDGE with FORJURER in the same passage and supplying a citation to Britton (cc. 1, 16) for the abjuration sense. This pairing suggests that Bouvier treated the two terms as conceptually proximate, which is useful context for researchers working in the Old English law period even though the terms are legally distinct.
What historical sources collectively miss: none of the dictionaries offer examples of FORJUDGE in actual pleading or judicial records, and none distinguish the procedural contexts in which forejudgment was the operative remedy (e.g., attorney discipline versus forfeiture of land rights versus expulsion from a guild or franchise). Researchers seeking that granularity should move directly to treatises on Old English law and the Year Books rather than relying on dictionary entries.
Jurisdictional Note
FORJUDGE and its cognate FOREJUDGE are creatures of English legal history with no direct counterpart in most American jurisdictions. The concept of judicial ouster or expulsion from a right or office survives in modern law under different vocabulary (disbarment, forfeiture, ouster), but the term itself is not operative in contemporary American or Commonwealth courts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: FOREJUDGE; ABJURATION; OUTLAWRY