Definition
Relegation is a form of banishment or exile imposed as a punishment, distinguished historically from perpetual exile by its temporary character. The person relegated was expelled from a jurisdiction or territory for a fixed period rather than permanently.
In Roman law, from which the English term derives its conceptual shape, relegation was a milder form of exile than deportation: the relegated person retained civil rights and citizenship but was required to leave a specified place or region. English law absorbed the term chiefly through academic and ecclesiastical sources, using it to describe temporary banishment as opposed to perpetual outlawry or transportation.
In Scots law, the term carried a specific procedural meaning relating to the act of Parliament or a special sovereign instrument effecting temporary exile, distinct from ordinary judicial banishment.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of being relegated; demotion in a hierarchy (as in business or employment); in sports, the movement of a team from a higher competitive division to a lower one at the end of a season.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of relegating, or the state of being relegated; removal; banishment; exile."
The common and legal meanings share a root sense of forced removal or demotion, but diverge sharply in context and consequence. In law, relegation is a penal sanction imposed by state authority with specific legal effects on civil status and liberty. The sports and business usage — familiar to any modern reader — carries no punitive or legal weight. A researcher encountering "relegation" in a historical legal document should not read it through the modern lens of competitive demotion; it refers to enforced absence from a place, often with significant civil consequences.
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Common Confusion
Relegation is frequently conflated with banishment, outlawry, and transportation, though these are distinct concepts. Banishment (or exile) in English law could be perpetual; relegation was specifically temporary. Outlawry involved the stripping of legal protection and civil rights, which relegation did not. Transportation — the forced removal of convicted persons to penal colonies — was a statutory creature of later English law with different procedural origins and effects. In Roman law sources (which appear frequently in early common law treatises), the contrast between relegatio and deportatio is critical: deportation was permanent and involved loss of citizenship, while relegation was time-limited and left civil rights intact. Researchers working in early modern English sources that draw on Roman law terminology should be alert to this distinction.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term is largely a historical artifact in English and American legal sources. It appears most frequently in treatises and digests written before 1800, often in discussions of Roman law punishments or in surveys of the early English penal system. Modern statutes and cases do not use the term in its legal sense.
Key research traps:
1. The Roman law meaning and the English law meaning are related but not identical. When Coke, Blackstone, or institutional writers cite Roman sources on relegation, they may be using the term with Roman precision; when later English writers use it loosely, they may mean simply temporary banishment without the civil-rights implications of the Roman concept.
2. Scots law usage is meaningfully different. Bouvier specifically flags Scots law as a context where relegation had a distinct technical sense tied to parliamentary action. Researchers working in Scottish legal history should not assume English common law definitions apply.
3. The word does not appear in American statutory law as a legal term of art. Any appearance in American sources is almost certainly in a comparative, historical, or academic context, not as operative legal language.
4. Cross-corpus connections: Relegation appears in discussions of attainder, outlawry, and the historical evolution of banishment as a penal tool. It also appears in ecclesiastical law discussions, where exile of clergy was sometimes described in similar terms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in substantial agreement on the core definition. Black's (both editions) and Burrill concur: relegation in old English law meant banishment for a time only, each citing Coke's Littleton (Co. Litt. 133) as authority. Bouvier adds useful specificity by noting that in Scots law, relegation was a temporary banishment or exile effected by special act of Parliament, grounding the concept in legislative rather than purely judicial action.
None of the historical dictionaries address the Roman law background in any depth, which limits their usefulness for researchers working with pre-seventeenth-century sources or with English writers who drew heavily on civil law. The Burrill entry is partially corrupted in available texts, running into an unrelated entry, but the substance matches the other dictionaries. The consistent citation to Co. Litt. 133 across multiple dictionaries suggests this was the primary English authority for the term, and researchers should consult Coke directly for the full doctrinal context.
What the historical dictionaries miss: none distinguish between the Roman law sense (temporary, rights-preserving) and the English common law usage, nor do they address the term's disappearance from active legal use after the expansion of transportation as the dominant penal exile mechanism in the eighteenth century.
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Jurisdictional Note
Relegation as a legal term of art is effectively confined to English and Scots historical law and to Roman law sources. It has no operative meaning in modern American, English, or Scottish law. Researchers working in continental European legal traditions will encounter the Roman law sense more directly, as civil law systems retained the relegatio/deportatio distinction longer than common law systems did.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Banishment; Punishment (Historical Forms); Outlawry
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