Definition
To fail or to have an ill outcome. Misevenire is a Norman-French legal term signifying that a matter has gone wrong, miscarried, or ended badly. It appears in older English common law texts and pleading records as a formulaic expression describing an adverse or unfortunate result in a legal proceeding or transaction. The term carries no technical procedural meaning of its own; it functions descriptively, characterizing an outcome rather than defining a cause of action or a remedy.
Common Language
This term has no meaningful common English counterpart. It is pure legal and historical Norman-French vocabulary with no modern civilian usage. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
Common Confusion
MISEVENIRE vs. MISFEASANCE: These terms share Norman-French roots and appear in proximity in Rapalje & Lawrence, but they should not be conflated. Misfeasance is a substantive legal concept describing the improper performance of a lawful act or the doing of a wrongful act; it generates liability and connects to a body of doctrine. Misevenire is purely descriptive, noting only that something went badly. One is a cause; the other is a characterization of result.
Why It Matters in Research
Misevenire appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English legal materials, particularly in Year Books, early common law reports, and Norman-French pleading forms. Researchers encountering the term in historical sources should treat it as a descriptive phrase embedded in surrounding context rather than as a term of art carrying independent legal weight. Its significance lies in what it is describing — a failed transaction, a miscarried action, a proceeding that went against a party — not in any doctrine attached to the word itself.
Because Rapalje & Lawrence place the entry immediately adjacent to misfeasance, researchers should be alert to the possibility that historical copyists and early indexers occasionally conflated or elided the two. They share Norman-French roots and appear in overlapping textual environments, but they are functionally distinct: misevenire describes an outcome; misfeasance describes a wrongful act. Confusing the two when transcribing or reading manuscript sources can distort understanding of what a historical author intended to convey.
The term is unlikely to appear in American legal materials except as a direct quotation from or citation to an English source. It does not survive as operative vocabulary in any modern common law jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the only dictionary entry recovered for this term, and it is notably brief: "To fail or succeed ill." The phrasing is itself archaic, and the editors appear to have included the term primarily for completeness in covering Norman-French vocabulary rather than because the term carried live doctrinal significance even in 1883. Rapalje & Lawrence immediately segue into misfeasance, suggesting the editorial judgment that misevenire warranted acknowledgment but not extended treatment.
No entry for misevenire appears in Black's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Burrill's Law Dictionary in the standard editions canvassed for the Law Mind corpus. Its absence from those works — each of which was more selective but also more practically oriented — reinforces the conclusion that misevenire was already a curiosity by the mid-nineteenth century, preserved in specialist historical dictionaries but not in working practitioner references.
The Norman-French construction is consistent with vocabulary appearing in the Year Books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, where such phrases described the fortune of litigation in a narrative rather than technical register.