Definition
"Mary" as a standalone legal term does not carry an independent substantive legal meaning. Anderson's Dictionary of Law treats the entry as a pure cross-reference, routing the reader to a cluster of procedural terms rather than defining any doctrine or legal concept by this name. The entry functions as an index node, not a definition.
Why It Matters in Research
The entry exists in Anderson's solely as a navigational device. Researchers encountering "Mary" in a historical legal index, digest, or table of contents should treat it as a pointer to procedural doctrine — specifically the cluster of concepts governing discontinuance of proceedings, stays, the disposition of records, and related process questions. The historical dictionaries do not define "Mary" as a term of art; they use the entry to bundle a set of cross-references under a heading, a common organizational practice in nineteenth-century legal reference works.
The practical research implication: if a historical source cites or discusses "Mary" in a procedural context without further explanation, the reference is almost certainly to one of the cross-referenced concepts below, or to a named case or statute using the word "Mary" (such as a vessel name, a party name, or a statutory short title). Vessel names in admiralty proceedings frequently appear in case reporters as single proper names (e.g., "The Mary"), and researchers working in admiralty should be alert to this pattern.
No common law doctrine, statutory scheme, or constitutional provision in the Anglo-American tradition carries "Mary" as its formal label in the way that, for example, a Mareva injunction carries a case-derived name. The absence of any substantive entry across the historical dictionary shelf confirms this.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides only a cross-reference string with no explanatory text. No substantive definition is offered, and no other historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides a competing or complementary entry. Webster's 1913 records "marrow" with a notation that "mary" was an obsolete form used by Chaucer — a purely linguistic artifact with no legal significance. The historical record offers nothing to synthesize here beyond the navigational function Anderson's assigns to the entry.