Definition
A Latin law term for a juror — a person sworn to serve on a jury and render a verdict according to the evidence. In older common law usage, the term also extended to a compurgator: a sworn witness who vouched for a party's oath or character in the ancient procedure of compurgation (also called wager of law). The term derives from the Latin jurare, meaning to swear, reflecting the oath-taking function central to both roles.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A juror.
Historical common usage: No entry in Webster's 1913; the term had passed from general English use by that period and survived only in legal Latin contexts.
Editorial note: The common and legal meanings are functionally identical when the term is used narrowly to mean juror. The gap appears at the historical margin: in legal sources, jurator could also mean compurgator — a distinct and now-obsolete role that no modern common speaker would associate with the word.
Common Confusion
Jurator and juror are substantively interchangeable in most historical sources, but jurator carries an additional meaning — compurgator — that juror does not. A researcher encountering jurator in a medieval or early modern text should not assume the modern jury context without confirming which institution is being described. Compurgation and trial by jury were distinct procedures; conflating them distorts the historical record. See also COMPURGATOR, JURAT (the certification clause on affidavits, unrelated to either).
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational trap for researchers working with early common law materials. Two distinct institutions used overlapping vocabulary: the jury (a group of neighbors sworn to determine facts) and compurgation (a sworn body of oath-helpers vouching for a party's credibility). Jurator appears in sources describing both. When Burrill notes the parenthetical "of assises turned into juries," he is gesturing at the historical process by which older communal oath procedures gradually transformed into the recognizable jury system — a transition that was neither clean nor uniform across jurisdictions.
Researchers should be attentive to date and context when encountering jurator in corpus sources. Pre-13th century uses are more likely to implicate compurgation; later uses trend toward the modern jury sense. The maxims preserved in Black's — Juratores debent esse vicini, sufficientes, et minus suspecti (jurors ought to be neighbors, of sufficient estate, and free from suspicion) and Juratores sunt judices facti (juries are the judges of fact) — reflect the developed jury institution and are useful anchors for dating the conceptual shift in a given source.
The neighborhood requirement embedded in the first maxim is historically significant: early jurors were expected to have personal knowledge of local facts, not merely to evaluate evidence presented to them. This is the opposite of the modern disqualification standard, where prior knowledge is grounds for removal. A researcher tracing the evolution of juror qualification standards will find jurator in sources reflecting both ends of that transformation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 1st and 2nd editions are essentially identical on this term, both defining jurator as a juror and compurgator and preserving the same two Latin maxims with citations to Jenk. Cent. (Jenkins' Centuries of Reports). The duplication across editions adds no new analytical content but confirms the term's stability in the classical common law vocabulary.
Burrill is fragmentary on this entry — the surviving text notes the Latin root jurare and the parenthetical reference to assises turning into juries, but the full entry appears truncated in the available corpus. What survives is nonetheless useful: Burrill's framing of the assize-to-jury transition signals that he understood jurator as a term straddling two procedural eras, not merely a synonym for the modern juror.
None of the historical dictionaries fully develops the compurgation dimension or explains the procedural mechanics that distinguish compurgators from jurors. Researchers needing that substantive treatment should look beyond the dictionary shelf.
Jurisdictional Note
Jurator is a term of historical English common law and appears primarily in English and early American legal sources. It has no active jurisdictional variation in modern law; the term is effectively obsolete in contemporary practice across all common law jurisdictions, having been replaced entirely by juror.