Definition
A person who has been expelled, degraded, or cast out of a recognized social, moral, or legal standing. In legal usage, the term carries a specific connotation of disgrace and degraded character — not merely absence from a community, but affirmative rejection on moral or reputational grounds. The term appears primarily in older American case law as a descriptive standard for assessing reputation, character testimony, and the standing of witnesses or parties in civil and criminal proceedings.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To cast out; to banish. As a noun, one who has been excluded from a society or group.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Cast out; degraded. Used adjectivally to describe a person rejected by society.
The gap between common and legal usage is subtle but important. Ordinary usage treats "outcast" as a social condition — someone excluded, whether by circumstance, poverty, or difference. Legal usage is narrower and more judgmental: it implies active disgrace, moral degradation, and reputational ruin. Being an outcast in the legal sense is not merely being on the margins of society; it is being affirmatively condemned by it.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in older American case law — primarily late nineteenth and early twentieth century opinions — where character and reputation were litigated directly. Courts reaching for language to describe the reputational floor of a witness or party sometimes used "outcast" as a threshold descriptor, distinguishing it from mere unpopularity or social nonconformity.
Researchers working with historical sources on defamation, slander per se, character witnesses, or impeachment testimony should watch for this term as a term of art signaling legal disability rooted in moral condemnation. The term is not a technical element of any modern doctrine; it functions more as judicial shorthand for a discredited or degraded character, the kind of person whose testimony or standing might be challenged on reputational grounds.
One navigational trap: in modern legal writing, "outcast" rarely appears and when it does, it carries only its ordinary social meaning. Do not read modern usage back into historical sources. The Kentucky decision cited in Bouvier's — from which the dictionary entry draws its definition — is using the term in the context of characterizing reputational evidence, a context that shaped how courts of that era deployed the word.
Researchers tracing the concept forward should pivot to successor vocabulary: "person of disreputable character," "moral turpitude," or impeachment by prior bad acts. The legal work once done by "outcast" has been absorbed into those more structured doctrines.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers a sparse but pointed entry, drawing directly from case language: "The word 'outcast' implies being a degraded and disgraced character." This is the full extent of Bouvier's treatment, and it reflects the term's status as a borrowed social descriptor rather than a term of art with formal legal definition.
The entry is notable for what it does: it anchors the legal meaning not in statute or treatise but in judicial usage, signaling that courts were treating this as an evidentiary or reputational concept developed through common law rather than codified doctrine. Bouvier does not attempt a broader definition, which itself tells the researcher something — this was not a term requiring extended legal analysis but rather one whose meaning was assumed to be self-evident from its moral content.
Webster's 1913 and the legal dictionary are in close agreement here, which is unusual and worth noting. The alignment suggests that the legal term was not a technical departure from ordinary usage but rather an adoption of common moral vocabulary into evidentiary practice. The slight legal sharpening — from social exclusion generally to specifically "degraded and disgraced" character — reflects courts using the term to do precise reputational work.
What historical sources miss: neither Bouvier's nor the case law of this era engages with how the term could be weaponized against marginalized groups whose "outcast" status reflected discrimination rather than genuine moral failing. Modern researchers should read historical uses of this term critically.
Jurisdictional Note
Usage of "outcast" as a legal descriptor was not uniform across jurisdictions. The cited authority is from Kentucky, and the term appears to have been used most freely in Southern and border-state courts of the early twentieth century. Researchers should not assume the term carried identical weight or meaning in federal courts or in jurisdictions with different evidentiary traditions.