Definition
Malveis procurours (Law French: "evil procurers" or "wicked procurers") is an archaic legal term denoting persons who corruptly interfered with the jury selection process by packing juries — that is, by manipulating which individuals would be nominated or impaneled as jurors in order to secure a predetermined outcome. The term appears in early English statutory law as a label for a recognized form of official or quasi-official misconduct directed at the administration of justice.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially extinct as an operative legal category but surfaces in research on the history of jury integrity, due process antecedents, and the development of English common law safeguards against corrupt administration of justice. Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal history should be alert to several points.
First, the term is tied to a specific statutory context — Articuli super Cartas (1300), chapter 10 — a confirmatory statute building on Magna Carta. Coke's commentary in the Second Institute (2 Inst. 561) is the primary explanatory authority and should be consulted directly; Burrill's entry essentially condenses Coke without adding independent analysis.
Second, the practice targeted by this term — jury nomination fraud — was distinct from bribery of seated jurors. Malveis procurours operated at the selection stage, corrupting the pool before deliberation began. This distinction matters when tracing the genealogy of modern doctrines addressing jury composition, impartial jury guarantees, and challenges to the array.
Third, researchers should not confuse this term with maintenance, champerty, or embracery, all of which address related but distinct forms of interference with legal proceedings. Embracery, which targets seated jurors directly, is the closest functional cousin.
Fourth, the Law French form of the term means that it will appear in variant spellings across historical sources. Expect malveys, malveis, malvais, and similar orthographic variants depending on the manuscript tradition or edition being consulted. Searches limited to a single spelling will miss parallel references.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief and derivative. It identifies the term correctly as Law French, locates it in the Articuli super Cartas, and points the reader to Coke's Second Institute — but does not elaborate on the conduct itself or its statutory consequences. No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Black, Jacob, Tomlin) appear to carry independent entries for this term, which reflects its narrow statutory origin and rapid obsolescence as a term of art.
The value of Burrill here is primarily as a pointer to primary sources rather than as an analytical authority. Coke's treatment in 2 Inst. 561 remains the most substantive historical commentary available and should be treated as the baseline source for any research involving this term. The Articuli super Cartas itself is a short statute and accessible in standard collections of English statutes.
The term's absence from later dictionaries suggests it dropped out of active legal usage well before the consolidation of the common law dictionary tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English legal tradition and has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or continental legal systems. It carries no operative force in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance is entirely historical.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Jury Packing; Articuli super Cartas; Embracery
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