Definition
An archaic Law French verb from old English law meaning to forjudge — that is, to expel, deprive, or condemn by judicial sentence. The term encompasses two closely related but distinct actions: (1) the expulsion of a person from a court or from their office by judicial decree, and (2) the deprivation of a person's legal status or legal rights as a consequence of judgment. A person forjudged the court was formally banished from its precincts; a person forjudged of their frank-law lost the rights and privileges that attended free legal standing.
Common Language
This is pure legal jargon of the Law French tradition with no meaningful counterpart in ordinary English usage. The common English verb "forjudge" is itself rare and derives directly from the legal term. COMMON LANGUAGE section omitted accordingly.
Common Confusion
FORJUGER should not be conflated with simple judgment or condemnation in the modern sense. The term carries the specific additional weight of expulsion or forfeiture of status — it is not merely a finding against a party but a stripping away of something held: an office, a place in court, or the privileges of frank-law. Researchers encountering the term in early English records should resist reading it as a synonym for any general adverse judgment.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English legal records and statutes predating the displacement of Law French from English legal practice. Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal sources — Year Books, early statutes, and treatises such as Britton — will encounter forjuger and its anglicized form forjudge in contexts involving professional discipline of court officers, disbarment-like proceedings, and the forfeiture of frank-law (the legal standing of a free person, loss of which was a significant civil consequence often accompanying conviction for certain offenses).
The dual application of the term is a research trap. In one context it describes institutional expulsion — an attorney or officer driven from the court — and in another it describes the stripping of a person's civil or legal status. Conflating these produces misreadings of early records. The Statute of 2 Hen. IV, c. 8, cited by Burrill, provides a concrete statutory anchor for the expulsion-from-office meaning and is a useful orienting document when tracing the term's official legal use.
The term's appearance in Britton (c. 52) in the phrase "forjuges de fraunche ley" connects forjuger directly to the broader regime of frank-law and its forfeitures — a topic with significant implications for understanding medieval English civil disability. Researchers pursuing the history of legal disqualification, attainder, or civil death will find forjuger a relevant node in that conceptual network.
By the seventeenth century the term had largely been superseded by English equivalents, and it does not survive as operative legal vocabulary in modern practice. Its presence in a source is itself a dating signal: texts using forjuger without explanation are almost certainly pre-modern in origin or are antiquarian treatises reconstructing early law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole historical dictionary source available for this entry, and his treatment is compact but informative. He correctly identifies the Law French origin, supplies two distinct applications of the term (expulsion from court/office and deprivation of frank-law), and anchors both with period sources — the Statute of 2 Hen. IV for the first, Britton for the second. This is useful because the two uses, while related, are not identical in legal effect, and Burrill's parallel citations make the distinction navigable.
What Burrill does not develop is the broader doctrinal context: the relationship between forjuger and the law of frank-law forfeiture, or the procedural mechanism by which such a judgment was rendered and enforced. Researchers needing that context will need to move beyond dictionary sources to the primary texts themselves — particularly Britton and the relevant Year Book materials — as well as to secondary scholarship on medieval English civil disability and legal status.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus supplies an entry for this term, so no comparative synthesis across sources is possible here.
Jurisdictional Note
Forjuger is exclusively a term of old English law. It has no recognized counterpart or parallel use in American legal sources, Scots law, or other common law jurisdictions as an operative term. Any appearance in American or post-colonial sources would be antiquarian quotation only.