Definition
To waive or forfeit a right of appeal through one's own conduct — specifically, by partially complying with or acquiescing in the judgment or sentence against which the appeal was taken. The term operates as a verb describing how an appellant extinguishes their own appellate right, not by formal withdrawal but by inconsistent conduct that treats the lower court's decision as operative.
In ecclesiastical procedure, where the term was most consistently applied, peremption of an appeal occurred when the appellant's voluntary acts — paying a portion of a penalty, obeying conditions of a sentence, or otherwise acting in conformity with the court's order — demonstrated acquiescence sufficient to defeat the appeal. The appellant, having in effect accepted the sentence, could no longer challenge it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To destroy or defeat.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To destroy; to defeat.
The common meaning tracks closely to the Latin root (perimo, to take away or destroy) and captures the general sense of obliteration or defeat. The legal meaning is narrower and more specific: peremption operates self-referentially — it is the appellant who destroys their own right, not an external party who destroys their position. The legal usage also attaches the concept firmly to appellate procedure rather than to adversarial defeat generally.
Common Confusion
PEREMPT is occasionally confused with PEREMPTORY, which shares the same Latin root but describes something altogether different in modern legal usage — a challenge made without stated cause (as in jury selection) or an absolute command. Peremptory derives from the same root notion of finality and destruction but has traveled far from its origins into procedural and command contexts. A researcher encountering perempt in historical sources should not read it as an adjective or assume it modifies the noun form peremptory challenge. The two terms are etymological cousins but functionally unrelated in practice.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a term of historical and ecclesiastical law. Researchers will encounter it primarily in English ecclesiastical court records, appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (which heard ecclesiastical appeals), and in treatises on ecclesiastical law such as Phillimore's Ecclesiastical Law and Rogers' Ecclesiastical Law — both cited across the dictionary sources.
The term has negligible presence in modern American civil or criminal procedure. A researcher who encounters perempt in a nineteenth-century American source should consider whether the source is borrowing from English ecclesiastical or civil law tradition, or whether a state court applying ecclesiastical principles (as in probate or marital causes) has imported the term.
The doctrine the term describes — forfeiture of appellate rights through acquiescence or partial compliance — survives in modern American law but under different vocabulary: waiver, acquiescence, or invited error. Researchers tracing the genealogy of these doctrines backward through historical sources will find perempt as an ancestor term.
The distinction between formal withdrawal of an appeal and peremption is research-critical: a perempted appeal was not voluntarily dismissed — it was treated as defeated by the appellant's own contradictory conduct. This distinction matters when examining whether courts treated peremption as jurisdictional (automatically stripping appellate authority) or as a defense the appellee had to raise.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries present a tight consensus on this term, which is unusual and reflects how narrow and settled its usage was. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence all track directly back to Phillimore's Ecclesiastical Law at page 1275, and Rapalje additionally cites Rogers' Ecclesiastical Law and Macpherson's Judicial Committee. Bouvier adds Rogers' Ecclesiastical Law independently. No dictionary departs from the ecclesiastical appellate context.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is whether the concept operated identically in civil law courts outside the ecclesiastical tradition. Bouvier's entry for PEREMPTORIUS notes that in civil law, a peremptory exception (exceptio peremptoria) was a perpetual bar — linking the root concept of permanent destruction to the procedural exception. This adjacent entry suggests a civil law pathway for the concept that the dictionaries treat separately rather than integrating into the perempt entry itself. Researchers working in Roman-influenced American jurisdictions (Louisiana in particular) should consider whether perempt and peremption carried civil law freight beyond the English ecclesiastical context.
Jurisdictional Note
Louisiana stands apart. Louisiana law uses peremption (noun form) as a live term of art in its civil law system, referring to a period during which a right must be exercised or be extinguished — functionally analogous to but distinct from prescription (limitation). This usage is a civil law inheritance and is unrelated to the ecclesiastical appellate meaning found in the historical dictionaries. Louisiana researchers must treat these as distinct concepts sharing a word.