Definition
"Iii U" as it appears in the supplemental materials to Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) is not a recognized legal term. The string appears to be a scanning or OCR (optical character recognition) artifact produced when digitizing historical legal texts. In context, the source passage concerns the term "QUASI-OFFICIAL" and its subtypes ("official act," "official assignee"), and the character sequence "111 U. S. 17" is a standard legal citation to volume 111 of the United States Reports — the official reporter for Supreme Court decisions. The string "Iii U" most likely represents a misread of "111 U" (the numeral 111 followed by the abbreviation "U." for United States Reports), a common OCR error when the digit "1" is misidentified as the lowercase letter "i."
No independent legal definition exists for "Iii U." Researchers encountering this string in the Law Mind corpus should treat it as a corrupted citation fragment, not a term of art.
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Common Confusion
"Iii U" should not be confused with any legal term, doctrine, or abbreviation. It should not be confused with "U visa" (a nonimmigrant visa classification for crime victims under U.S. immigration law), which is an entirely separate and substantive legal concept. The visual similarity between OCR-corrupted citation fragments and short abbreviations used in immigration or administrative law is occasionally a source of confusion in automated corpus analysis.
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Why It Matters in Research
This entry exists as a navigational warning for corpus researchers. Digitized legal reference works — particularly older editions of Black's Law Dictionary — were frequently produced by scanning physical volumes and processing them through OCR software. The numeral "1" and the lowercase letter "l" or "i" are visually nearly identical in many typefaces used in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legal printing, leading to systematic misreads. The sequence "111 U. S." (a citation to the United States Reports) is especially prone to corruption: all three characters before the space are the digit "1," and each can independently be misread as "l" or "i."
The practical consequence is that searches of digitized legal texts for case citations, particularly to older volumes of the United States Reports, may fail entirely when the volume number has been corrupted. A researcher searching for "111 U.S. 17" (Lammon v. Feusier, 1884) will not surface results where the citation has been rendered "Iii U. S. 17" or similar variants. Conversely, a researcher who encounters "Iii U" in a source should not conclude that an unfamiliar legal concept is present — the first investigative step is to examine the surrounding text and reconstruct the original citation.
This problem is not limited to volume 111. Any volume number composed entirely or predominantly of the digit "1" — volumes 1, 11, 111, etc. — is susceptible. Researchers working with digitized versions of Black's supplemental materials, early federal reporters, or any scanned nineteenth-century legal text should calibrate search strategies accordingly: use wildcard searches, search for surrounding text rather than the citation string alone, and verify against authoritative print or facsimile sources when citation accuracy is critical.
The actual case referenced in the source passage — cited as "111 U. S. 17, 4 Sup. Ct. 286, 28 L. Ed. 337" — is Lammon v. Feusier, a real Supreme Court decision and a legitimate authority on the scope of official acts. Researchers interested in that underlying doctrine should pursue the correctly rendered citation, not the corrupted string.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.), Supplemental Volume, contains the passage from which this artifact originates. The passage defines quasi-official and its compounds, citing Turner v. Sisson and Lammon v. Feusier for the proposition that an official act is one performed by an officer in an official capacity under color and by virtue of office. The source text is substantively sound; the corruption is entirely a product of the digitization process and does not reflect any ambiguity or variation in the original print source.
Historical legal dictionaries predating digital production do not, of course, contain this artifact. It is a creature of the digital age imposed on analog source material.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
For the underlying legal doctrine referenced in the source passage (official and quasi-official acts), see: The Federal Judiciary — Article III Courts, Tenure, and Salary Protection (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia).
For the immigration concept that shares surface similarity in abbreviated form, see: Domestic Violence — Immigration Relief (VAWA Self-Petition, U Visa, T Visa) (The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia).
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