Definition
A second disseisin of a person from the same lands or tenements, committed by the same disseisor who had already wrongfully dispossessed that person once before and been adjudged to have done so. The term presupposes a prior adjudication: the original disseisor was found liable, yet returned to dispossess the same victim again. English law developed a specific writ — the writ of redisseisin — to address this aggravated wrong, reflecting the common law's recognition that a repeated offender who defied judicial resolution warranted a sharper remedy than the ordinary assize of novel disseisin.
To understand redisseisin, the parent concept must be clear. Disseisin was the wrongful dispossession of a freeholder from their land — the feudal era's core property wrong. When a disseised person successfully recovered possession through the assize of novel disseisin, the matter was supposed to be settled. Redisseisin arose when the same disseisor, undeterred by that judgment, ousted the same person a second time from the same property. It was, in essence, contempt of the original recovery dressed in the language of land law.
Common Language
Wiktionary lists "redisseisin" only as an alternative form of "redisseizin," without independent definition, pointing back to the root term. The word has no meaningful presence in modern non-legal English.
There is no common-language gap to navigate here: redisseisin is pure legal jargon of the old English land law, carrying no ordinary modern meaning. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
Common Confusion
REDISSEISIN vs. DISSEISIN: Disseisin is the base wrong — any wrongful dispossession of a freeholder. Redisseisin is a specific, aggravated form requiring (1) a prior disseisin by the same person, (2) an adjudication against that disseisor, and (3) a second dispossession of the same victim from the same land. The "re-" prefix is not merely descriptive; it carries legal weight, triggering a distinct writ and historically a more severe remedy.
REDISSEISIN vs. ABATEMENT / INTRUSION: These were other common law wrongs involving wrongful entry onto land, but they applied in different circumstances — abatement where an heir was kept out after an ancestor's death, intrusion where a stranger entered after a life tenant's death. Neither required a prior adjudication against the same wrongdoer, which is the distinguishing feature of redisseisin.
Why It Matters in Research
Redisseisin is a relic term. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical English legal materials — treatises, Year Books, Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, and Reeves' History of English Law — and in American legal dictionaries that carried forward English common law vocabulary into the nineteenth century. It has no operative existence in modern American or English law.
The primary research trap is treating the term as interchangeable with disseisin generally. Sources that discuss the assize of novel disseisin may mention redisseisin in passing without clarifying that the two involved different procedures and different remedies. Blackstone's Commentaries (Book 3) is the standard citation across all three source dictionaries here, and his treatment remains the most accessible explanation of how the writ of redisseisin functioned procedurally.
Researchers working in American legal history through the mid-nineteenth century may encounter redisseisin in state court opinions or treatises that still engaged seriously with common law real property forms. After the abolition or displacement of the forms of action in most American jurisdictions — accelerated by Field Code reforms beginning in 1848 — the term effectively disappears from operative legal usage.
One navigational note: the Black's 2nd edition entry contains what appears to be a transcription artifact, opening with language about warranty against eviction ("take it back; a defect against which the seller is bound to warrant. Poth. Cont. Sale") before pivoting to the redisseisin definition. This suggests a formatting error in that edition where text from an adjacent entry (likely relating to a French or civilian concept of warranty) was merged with the redisseisin entry. Researchers relying on that edition should treat the Pothier reference as belonging to a separate term.
The Rapalje & Lawrence definition adds a useful precision absent from both Black's editions: it specifies that the disseisor must have been "bound and adjudged" to have committed the prior disseisin — emphasizing that the prior judicial finding is an element of the wrong, not merely a historical fact.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in substantive agreement: redisseisin requires identity of wrongdoer, identity of victim, identity of property, and a prior adjudication. The Blackstone citation (3 Bl. Comm. 188) appears across Black's 1st and 2nd editions. Rapalje & Lawrence supplements with Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and Reeves' History of English Law — both more granular sources on the writ practice than Blackstone.
What none of the historical dictionaries address is the remedy dimension. Historical sources, including Fitzherbert, indicate that redisseisin carried heavier consequences than novel disseisin — the disseisor could face imprisonment in addition to dispossession, reflecting the aggravated nature of defying a prior judgment. This aspect of the doctrine goes unmentioned in the dictionary entries and must be pursued in the treatise literature.
No dictionary in the source set engages with American reception of this doctrine, which was limited and largely theoretical given that the real property forms of action never took deep root in most American jurisdictions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Disseisin; Forms of Action (Real Property); Assize of Novel Disseisin.