Definition
Lex amissa (Latin: "law lost" or "law forfeited") refers to the legal status of a person who has been stripped of the ordinary protections and benefits of the law — specifically, one who is infamous, perjured, or outlawed. Bouvier frames this concisely as "the law concerning outlaws." The term describes both the condition of such a person and the body of rules governing that condition.
A person who had suffered lex amissa was one who had forfeited their standing before the law — their libera lex, or "free law" — through some act of moral or legal disqualification. The paradigmatic examples drawn from Bracton include the infamous, the perjured, and the outlaw. Such a person could not function as a witness, could not bring certain actions, and was in various respects cast outside the law's ordinary protection.
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Common Confusion
Lex amissa is closely connected to — and sometimes conflated with — the phrase liberam legem amittere, meaning "to lose one's free law." Rapalje & Lawrence make this connection explicit, cross-referencing the two. The distinction is subtle but meaningful: liberam legem amittere describes the act or process of forfeiture (the losing), while lex amissa describes the resulting status or the legal framework governing those who have suffered that forfeiture. Researchers encountering either phrase in historical sources should check both entries.
The term should also not be confused with lex angliæ (law of England) or other lex phrases, which appear in close proximity in historical dictionaries and can create reading confusion in older texts.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a term of medieval English law, rooted in Bracton and operative in a period when legal personality — one's standing to sue, testify, and enjoy the king's peace — could be formally stripped away. Researchers working in pre-modern common law sources, records of outlawry, or early criminal procedure will encounter this concept embedded in Latin pleadings, treatise discussions, and commentary.
The practical research trap: lex amissa does not survive as a live term in modern common law. Its conceptual descendants — civil death, witness disqualification by conviction, and attainder — appear in modern sources under entirely different headings. A researcher who traces the doctrine forward must abandon this Latin phrase and follow those successors.
The corpus connection to Bracton is significant. Bracton lib. 4, c. 19 is the cited authority in both Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence, and that text provides the most detailed historical treatment. Researchers should also examine sources on outlawry, infamy, and attainder for related doctrine.
Historical dictionaries treat this term briefly. None provides a sustained treatment of the procedural consequences of lex amissa — the specific incapacities it imposed — leaving researchers to reconstruct those consequences from Bracton directly and from secondary treatise literature on early English criminal law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries converge on the core meaning but differ in emphasis. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence both define the term as describing a person (one who is infamous, perjured, or outlawed) and both cite Bracton lib. 4, c. 19 as the controlling authority. Bouvier takes a slightly different structural approach, defining it as "the law concerning outlaws" — focusing on the body of law rather than on the status of the individual. This is a genuine, if small, divergence in framing: person-centered versus doctrine-centered.
None of the three dictionaries elaborates the substantive consequences of the status in any detail, and none traces its relationship to later doctrines. For a term with real procedural teeth in medieval practice, the historical dictionary treatment is thin. Rapalje & Lawrence's cross-reference to liberam legem amittere is the most useful navigational contribution among the three, pointing researchers toward the fuller doctrinal picture.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Outlawry | Civil Death | Liberam Legem Amittere
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