Definition
To place a person under the protection of the law; to restore legal standing to one previously outside the law's protection. As a verb, *inlaw* describes the formal act by which a sovereign or court reintegrated an outlaw or attainted person into the legal community, restoring rights and protections that had been stripped by outlawry or attainder.
The term is archaic and appears in modern legal sources only in historical or antiquarian contexts. It has no active doctrinal use in contemporary law.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alternative form of *in-law*, referring to a relative by marriage (as in *mother-in-law*, *brother-in-law*).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To clear of outlawry or attainder; to place under the protection of the law.
The gap here is nearly total. The modern common meaning of *inlaw* (or *in-law*) — a relation by marriage — has no connection whatsoever to the historical legal term. A researcher encountering *inlaw* as a verb in an early English legal text is looking at a term of art from the law of outlawry, not a reference to family relationship. The two words share spelling but nothing else.
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Common Confusion
Do not confuse the archaic legal verb *inlaw* with the modern noun *in-law*. In historical legal sources, *inlaw* always functions as a verb and always operates in the context of outlawry, attainder, or the formal restoration of legal personhood. In ordinary modern usage, *in-law* is a purely relational noun describing family by marriage. The convergence in spelling is coincidental and context-dependent; the legal sense is effectively obsolete.
Also distinguish *inlaw* from *outlaw* (both verb and noun). *To outlaw* stripped a person of legal protection; *to inlaw* restored it. These are functional opposites within the same historical framework.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal records — particularly Year Books, leet records, or medieval plea rolls — may encounter *inlaw* as an active term of procedure. Its appearance signals a formal act of legal restoration, not merely a descriptive statement of status. Understanding that *inlaw* is the procedural counterpart to *outlaw* is essential to correctly interpreting what is happening in a given record.
The Bacon quotation preserved in both editions of Black's — "Swearing obedience to the king in a leet, which doth inlaw the subject" — points to a specific procedural context: the leet court, a local jurisdiction with historical authority over frankpledge and community order. The act of swearing obedience was the operative gesture that triggered the legal restoration. Researchers using Law Mind sources on outlawry, attainder, or frankpledge will find *inlaw* appearing in that nexus.
Because the term is absent from most modern legal dictionaries and has been collapsed into near-invisibility by the unrelated modern noun *in-law*, it is a genuine trap in historical corpus work. A keyword search for *inlaw* in a digitized collection will surface both the archaic legal verb and modern relational noun references indiscriminately. Researchers should filter by date and syntactic context (verb vs. noun use) to distinguish them.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's carry identical entries, suggesting the second edition reproduced the first without revision — itself a signal that the editors regarded the term as settled history rather than living doctrine by the time of publication. Both cite Bacon without further elaboration, and neither edition attempts to connect *inlaw* to contemporary practice.
Webster's 1913 adds the gloss "to clear of outlawry or attainder" and cites Burrill (Alexander Burrill's *Law Dictionary*, 1850s), giving the term slightly richer framing than Black's. The Webster's formulation is more precise: it distinguishes between clearing *outlawry* (a procedural status) and clearing *attainder* (a more severe legal consequence typically involving corruption of blood and forfeiture). Whether *inlaw* technically operated to reverse both, or only outlawry, is a question the historical dictionaries leave open.
No edition of Black's or the Webster's entry assigns *inlaw* any continuing statutory or common law function. The term is treated by all sources as descriptive of historical practice.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Inlaw* as a legal term belongs exclusively to the historical English common law tradition. It has no recognized counterpart in American law, and the conditions that gave rise to it — formal outlawry, leet courts, frankpledge — were never transplanted to American jurisdiction in operative form.
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