Definition
"Ing process" does not appear as a recognized legal term in the primary sources available for this entry. The historical dictionary material supplied under this heading — drawn from Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) — concerns the Scots law concept of a judicial factor: a court-appointed agent entrusted with managing property, finding tenants, collecting rents, and conducting estate affairs on behalf of another. That material does not define or describe a term called "ing process."
Two possibilities exist for a researcher encountering this term:
1. TYPOGRAPHICAL OR INDEXING ERROR. "Ing process" may be a corrupted or truncated form of another term — most likely "MESNE PROCESS," "ORIGINAL PROCESS," "FINAL PROCESS," or "DUE PROCESS." In older printed legal dictionaries and digitized indexes, spacing errors, OCR artifacts, and binding truncations routinely produce fragments of this kind. A researcher who has encountered "ing process" in a source should examine the surrounding context to reconstruct the full term.
2. SCOTS LAW FACTOR CONTEXT. If the source material reproduced above is the intended entry, the operative concept is the judicial factor in Scots law — a court-appointed administrator of property or estates, distinct from a privately appointed agent. This figure is analogous in function (though not in legal basis) to a receiver or administrator in common law jurisdictions.
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Common Confusion
Researchers encountering "ing process" in a digitized or transcribed legal source should not treat it as a standalone term of art. The fragment most likely derives from a compound term ending in "-ing process" (e.g., "mesne process," where historical typesetting or scanning has dropped the leading characters) or from a separate entry entirely misattributed through indexing error. The Black's material supplied here — defining a Scots law judicial factor — has no apparent connection to any recognized "ing process" concept and should be understood as a retrieval artifact rather than a genuine definitional pairing.
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Why It Matters in Research
This entry is a research warning, not a substantive definition. Several traps are worth flagging for Law Mind corpus users:
First, OCR degradation is endemic in digitized nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legal materials. Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., 1910) was typeset in dense double-column format; scanning artifacts frequently truncate headwords or merge adjacent entries. A search result returning "ing process" almost certainly reflects one of these failure modes.
Second, the Scots law judicial factor material that arrived under this heading is genuine and substantively important — but it belongs under "FACTOR" or "JUDICIAL FACTOR," not under any process-related headword. If you are researching Scots law property administration, estate management, or the powers of court-appointed agents in civil law-influenced systems, pursue those terms directly.
Third, if the underlying term of interest is a form of legal process — original process, mesne process, final process, or due process — each of those terms has its own developed body of doctrine, historical evolution, and research pathway. Do not rely on a fragment to anchor research into any of them.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) does not contain a headword "ing process." The text supplied as source material for this entry defines a Scots law judicial factor: a court-appointed person who manages property for another, with particular application to landed estates. Black's places this definition under a numbered subentry (noted as "3."), indicating it is a subsection of a larger entry — almost certainly "FACTOR" — and has been extracted or mis-indexed in transmission to this entry.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind shelf assigns meaning to "ing process" as a freestanding term. Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, and Burrill's Law Dictionary do not contain this headword. The absence is itself informative: the term has no historical pedigree as an independent legal concept.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Due Process of Law — Substantive Due Process Origins and Framework (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia). Relevant only if the underlying research interest is in "due process" rather than the fragment "ing process." Consult that entry for the constitutional framework governing substantive due process doctrine.
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