Definition
In old English and Anglo-Norman legal practice, *passer* is a Law French verb meaning to pass, to proceed, or to go forward in the course of law. It appears in the formulaic language of medieval pleading and adjudication to describe the formal movement of a verdict or judgment through the procedural sequence — that is, the act of a verdict being rendered or a judgment being entered and taking effect. The term operates as a verb of legal completion: once a verdict or assize had *passed*, the proceeding had reached a decisive stage and the court could act upon the result.
The word surfaces most characteristically in contexts such as *passera jugement* (judgment shall pass) and *l'assise eyt passe pur le pleyntyfe* (the assize has passed for the plaintiff), both of which appear in Britton, the late thirteenth-century French-language treatise on English law attributed to John le Breton.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who passes something along; a distributor; a passer-by; a football player who makes a forward pass; one who is able to "pass" as a member of a social group.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who passes; a passenger.
The common meaning of *passer* — someone who passes through or passes an object to another — bears only incidental resemblance to the legal usage. In legal context, *passer* is not a noun describing a person but a verb describing the formal legal act by which a verdict proceeds to judgment. A researcher encountering the term in a medieval English legal text should not read it through the lens of modern agency or physical transfer.
Common Confusion
The Latin word *passer* (a sparrow) shares spelling but nothing else with the Law French legal term. Latin-trained readers encountering *passer* in an Anglo-Norman legal text may momentarily misread the register. The word belongs firmly to the Law French vocabulary of English common law pleading, not to classical Latin legal writing.
Additionally, modern readers may conflate the verbal sense of *passer* (to pass, as a judgment passes) with the noun form *passer* in later English legal usage, where one who "passes" a forged instrument — a *passer* of counterfeit — became a recognized term in criminal law. These are distinct usages separated by centuries of semantic drift and entirely different legal contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with early English common law sources — Year Books, Britton, Bracton, Fleta, and the early plea rolls — will encounter *passer* and its conjugated forms embedded in Law French passages describing procedural outcomes. The term is a marker of procedural completion: its presence signals that a verdict has been rendered or that judgment is about to be entered, and understanding it correctly is essential for tracking the sequence of proceedings in these sources.
Two research traps apply. First, the term appears without translation or gloss in most primary sources of the period; Burrill provides the core identification, but the word will not appear in modern legal dictionaries, and a researcher relying solely on post-nineteenth-century reference tools will find no entry. Second, the shift from Law French to English legal pleading — formalized in England by statute in the mid-seventeenth century — means that *passer* and its cognates effectively disappear from primary legal sources after that transition. A researcher tracing the concept of "passing judgment" into later English and American law must shift vocabulary entirely, moving to the English "rendered," "entered," or "pronounced" to capture what *passer* once described.
The related criminal law usage — a *passer* of forged or counterfeit instruments — emerges in English and American law considerably later and is indexed under different headings in both legal dictionaries and case reporters. Researchers should not assume continuity between the old procedural term and the criminal law noun.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential identification of *passer* as a Law French procedural term and supplies the primary illustrative passages from Britton, chapter 51 and chapter 75. Burrill's treatment is characteristically spare: he translates the term, provides the citations, and moves on. No broader synthesis of how the term operates across the Year Books or how it relates to the Latin *transire* (used in parallel Latin pleading contexts) is offered.
What Burrill does not address — and what no standard historical law dictionary covers in depth — is the way *passer* functions as a term of art marking the threshold between jury deliberation and judicial action. The verb implies both a temporal moment (the verdict has now passed) and a legal consequence (the court may now proceed). This procedural significance is better recovered from the Year Books themselves and from Maitland's scholarship on early common law procedure than from dictionary sources alone.
Jurisdictional Note
*Passer* as a Law French procedural term is specific to the English common law tradition and its Anglo-Norman documentary record. It has no direct counterpart in Scottish, civilian, or American sources as a term of art. The criminal law usage of *passer* (one who passes forged instruments) developed in English and American jurisdictions independently and should be researched through criminal law headings rather than through this entry.