Definition
An old legal term referring to a judgment by which a person is deprived of something, expelled from a court, or banished — effectively, to be put outside the protection or benefit of law by judicial decree. The term encompasses at least three related but distinct applications in historical legal usage:
1. Deprivation by judgment. A court's pronouncement stripping a party of a right, property, or legal standing.
2. Expulsion from court. The act of formally putting a person out of court — removing them from the court's protection or barring their further participation — by judicial act.
3. Banishment or outlawry. A judgment declaring a person an outlaw or proclaiming their exile, placing them beyond the ordinary reach of legal remedy or community.
The term is closely related to the Latin forms FORJUDICARE and FORISJUDICATIO and the French FORJUGER, all of which share the root construction of foris (outside, beyond) combined with judicare (to judge) — conveying the essential idea of judicial exclusion.
Common Confusion
FORJUDGMENT, FOREJUDGE, and FORISJUDICATIO are sometimes used interchangeably in historical sources, but they are not always synonymous. FOREJUDGE typically refers to the act of the court in expelling a person or depriving them of a right as a penalty; FORISJUDICATIO refers more specifically to the resulting condition or the formal proceeding of deprivation; and FORJUDGMENT describes the judgment itself as an instrument of exclusion. Researchers encountering any of these terms in early common law or continental sources should confirm which specific sense is intended from context, as writers did not always observe consistent distinctions among them.
Why It Matters in Research
FORJUDGMENT is an archaic term that will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern common law sources, early English legal treatises, and historical records touching feudal courts, outlawry proceedings, or ecclesiastical discipline. It is essentially dead in modern legal usage.
Several traps await researchers in historical sources:
First, the term is orthographically unstable. It appears as FORJUDGMENT, FORJUDICATIO, FORISJUDICATIO, FORJUGER, FOREJUDGE, and FOREJUDGMENT across different sources and centuries. A search using only one spelling will miss significant related material.
Second, the three functional meanings — deprivation, expulsion from court, and outlawry — can look similar on the surface but have very different procedural and substantive consequences in the historical record. A judgment depriving someone of land is a different legal event from a proclamation of outlawry, even if the same term appears in both contexts.
Third, continental European legal systems (particularly Norman and French customary law) used cognate forms of this term in ways that do not map precisely onto English common law usage. Sources drawing on Spelman or continental glossaries may reflect a broader or different sense than purely English authorities would support.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, FORJUDGMENT is a gateway term to the cluster of concepts around outlawry, abjuration, and judicial forfeiture. It connects naturally to entries on ATTAINDER, ABJURATION, OUTLAWRY, and FORFEITURE, and researchers pursuing the historical mechanics of how courts stripped individuals of rights and standing will find those entries useful alongside this one.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not define FORJUDGMENT directly as a standalone entry but directs the reader to ABJUDICATIO and FORISJUDICATIO, treating FORJUDICARE as the operative Latin form. Burrill's synthesis draws on Spelman for the core meaning of deprivation by judgment (foris judicium ponere — to place outside judgment) and notes the outlawry dimension: forjudicari bannitus debebit per justi — the person forjudged ought to be proclaimed banished by justice.
Burrill does not provide significant doctrinal elaboration, which reflects the term's status even by the mid-nineteenth century as a relic of medieval practice rather than a living legal concept. Historical dictionaries generally agree on the three core meanings identified above, though they differ in emphasis: some foreground the deprivation-of-property sense (treating it as an ancestor of forfeiture), while others emphasize the expulsion-from-court sense (treating it as a procedural sanction). The outlawry meaning receives the least sustained treatment but is attested across sources.
What historical dictionaries largely miss is any systematic treatment of how these three meanings related to one another procedurally, or how the term functioned differently in feudal versus ecclesiastical versus royal court contexts. Researchers needing that granularity will need to move beyond dictionary sources to primary records and specialist histories of medieval legal procedure.