Definition
To restore a person to the protection and standing of the law after that standing has been forfeited or suspended. In old English law, a person who had been outlawed — placed outside the law's protection — could be inlegiared by satisfying the law's demands: paying debts, submitting to judgment, or otherwise making amends sufficient to be recognized again as rectus in curia (right in court, or in good standing before the court). The term describes both the act of restoration and, in some usages, the legal process by which that restoration was formally accomplished.
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Common Confusion
INLEGIARE and OUTLAW (v.) are conceptual opposites but are sometimes collapsed in historical sources that discuss outlawry without clearly describing the reversal procedure. Outlawry placed a person extra legem — beyond the law's protection and incapable of using the courts. Inlegiare reversed that status. Researchers treating outlawry as purely punitive and permanent may overlook the procedural mechanism for restoration that inlegiare describes. The two terms belong together and should be researched as a pair.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with medieval English law and the institution of outlawry. It will not be found in modern statutory or case law, and its absence from most modern legal dictionaries reflects the disappearance of formal outlawry from English and American law. Researchers working in early common law materials, Year Books, or treatises touching the sheriff's role and the king's courts should be alert to the term and its variants.
Several research traps are worth noting. First, inlegiare is a term of art embedded in the outlawry framework; understanding it requires familiarity with the companion concept of being extra legem, and with rectus in curia as the standard of restored standing. Second, historical sources vary in how they describe the mechanics of restoration — some emphasize payment of debts or fines, others emphasize formal court submission — so the term carries procedural ambiguity that cannot always be resolved from the definition alone. Third, because outlawry carried consequences in both civil and criminal contexts in early English law, inlegiare may appear in either setting, and the nature of the underlying forfeiture affects what "satisfying the law's demands" required in a given case.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary, drawing on Cowell's Interpreter, provides the core definition: to restore to the favor of the law by satisfying its demands, glossed by the phrase rectus in curia. This is the primary historical dictionary entry for the term, and no significant divergence among shelf sources exists — in part because the term is rare enough that few historical dictionaries include it at all.
The entry is thin by necessity. Cowell's gloss is useful in confirming that the concept is procedural (a person does something — satisfies demands — and is thereby restored) rather than purely administrative. The phrase rectus in curia is the operative test of restoration and is itself a term with its own history in early common law pleading.
What historical sources do not address is the institutional question of who had authority to inlegiare, under what circumstances, and whether the process required formal court action or could be accomplished by satisfaction alone. Researchers requiring that level of detail will need to consult primary sources and treatises on outlawry directly, as the dictionary tradition does not resolve it.
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Jurisdictional Note
Inlegiare is a term of English legal history with no direct American counterpart. Formal outlawry was carried into some early American jurisdictions but was largely abolished by statute during the nineteenth century. The concept of inlegiare has no surviving procedural analog in U.S. law.
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