Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "not." Used in early common law legal texts and pleadings as a negative particle, functioning as the equivalent of the Latin "non" or the English "not." It appears primarily in abbreviated legal formulae and maxims drawn from the Norman French that dominated English legal practice from the Conquest through the early modern period.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surname.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not attested as a common English word.
The term has no surviving presence in ordinary modern English. Its sole legal significance is as a relic of Law French, the specialized legal dialect distinct from both ordinary Old French and Middle English. A researcher encountering "nemy" in a historical legal document should not treat it as a personal name or a recognizable English word — it is a functional negative particle embedded in Norman legal grammar.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in very early common law materials and in secondary sources that quote or gloss those materials. Both editions of Black's cite only Littleton's *Tenures* (Litt. § 3) as the source context, which signals that this is a term of extremely narrow temporal and textual scope — relevant primarily to researchers working in medieval English land law or examining the paleographic and linguistic conventions of pre-modern legal manuscripts.
Researchers should be alert to several traps:
First, Law French negatives were often contracted or abbreviated in manuscript sources. "Nemy" may appear in variant spellings, and without familiarity with Law French conventions, it could be misread or mistranscribed in older printed editions.
Second, because Black's both in its first and second editions cite the identical single source (Litt. § 3) with no elaboration, the entry reflects the outer boundary of the term's attested usage in mainstream legal lexicography. This is not a term with a rich doctrinal history — it is a linguistic building block, not a legal concept.
Third, researchers using digitized historical legal sources should consider that keyword searches for "nemy" may return false positives (personal names, OCR artifacts) and may miss the term when it appears in variant or contracted form.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary (1st ed.) and Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed.) give nearly identical entries, each consisting of the language designation "L. Fr." (Law French) and a single citation to Littleton's *Tenures*, § 3. Neither edition elaborates on the term's grammatical role, collocations, or the broader Law French negative system of which it forms a part.
The extreme brevity of both entries is itself informative: this term was included in Black's for completeness and as an aid to readers of original sources rather than as a term of active doctrinal significance even at the time of those editions. Later editions of Black's dropped or consolidated many Law French particles, and the term does not appear to have generated independent commentary in legal treatises.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the comparative Law French vocabulary — "nemy" alongside other negative forms and how these functioned in pleading formulae — which would require consulting specialized Law French glossaries or scholarship on Norman legal language rather than standard American legal dictionaries.
---
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs to the common law of England and has no direct application in civil law jurisdictions. In the United States, it is purely a historical linguistic artifact with no operative legal meaning in any American jurisdiction.
---