Definition
In legal usage, a **poser** is a procedural term drawn from Law French meaning "to put" or "to put a question." In the context of pleading and oral argument — particularly in the common law courts of medieval and early modern England — a poser was a question put by one party to another, or by the court to counsel or a party, designed to test the soundness of a legal position or to press an adversary to commit to a particular construction of fact or law. The term also appears in the formulaic phrase *et jeo pose* ("and I put"), signifying the act of formally putting a proposition or hypothetical to an opponent in pleading or moot argument.
The term is not a term of art in modern legal practice. Its significance is almost entirely historical, appearing in Year Books and early reports as part of the vocabulary of oral pleading and legal disputation.
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Common Language
**Modern common usage (Wiktionary):** A particularly difficult question or puzzle; also, someone who poses for photographs or art, or a poseur affecting a style to impress others.
**Historical common usage (Webster's 1913):** "One who, or that which, puzzles; a difficult or inexplicable question or fact."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is instructive. The ordinary English sense — a baffling puzzle — is a weakened descendant of the Law French procedural sense. In legal usage, a poser was not merely a hard question but a formally *put* question: a deliberate act in oral argument or pleading, carrying procedural weight. The common language retained the sense of difficulty but lost the sense of formal procedural placement.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Book material, early common law reports, or treatises on pleading practice will encounter this term as part of the standard vocabulary of oral argument and moot disputation. Several points warrant attention:
**Formulaic context.** The phrase *et jeo pose* signals a specific rhetorical and procedural move: a party or counsel placing a proposition before the court or opponent. Recognizing the term as a verb form (from Law French *poser*, to put or place) as well as a noun is essential to correctly parsing Year Book passages, where the same root appears in variant forms.
**Moots and legal education.** The poser had particular salience in the Inns of Court moot tradition, where senior members would put posers — difficult hypotheticals — to students arguing cases. Some early printed texts preserve collections of posers used in this educational context. Researchers tracing the history of legal education or appellate advocacy style may find the term in this instructional sense.
**Not a term of modern pleading.** The term carries no operative meaning in contemporary practice. A researcher who encounters it in a secondary source written after the nineteenth century should treat it as either a historical reference or a loose borrowing of the ordinary English sense (a hard question), not a technical legal concept.
**Relationship to *pose* and *posito*.** The Law French and Latin relatives of this term — *poser*, *posito*, *positio* — appear in related contexts (hypothetical pleading, the setting of conditions) and are worth tracing as connected vocabulary in the same corpus of sources.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the sole shelf source for this term, and his entry is brief: the Law French root (*to put; to set at; to put a question*), a cite to Kelham's glossary, and the Year Book reference (*Yearb. H. 8 Hen. VI. 7*) with the formulaic phrase *et jeo pose*. This is characteristic of Burrill's treatment of Law French procedural vocabulary — accurate and precise within its scope, but not expansive.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus — not Jacob, not Tomlin, not Bouvier — carry a dedicated entry for *poser* as a legal term of art, which itself signals the term's limited technical footprint outside the Year Book tradition. Researchers should not expect broader doctrinal discussion in standard reference works. The most productive sources will be Kelham's *Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language* and direct engagement with Year Book texts.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to the English common law tradition and has no established counterpart in American, Scottish, or civilian legal vocabulary. It does not appear as a term of art in any modern jurisdiction.
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