Definition
Remitment has two related but distinct procedural meanings:
1. The act of sending a person back into custody — as when a court or magistrate returns an accused or convicted person to confinement after a temporary release or hearing.
2. An annulment or cancellation — the setting aside or voiding of a prior act, order, or proceeding.
The first meaning is the more practically significant in legal contexts, describing a judicial or quasi-judicial act rather than a mere administrative one. The second meaning overlaps substantially with the broader concept of remission and appears less frequently in discrete legal usage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of remitting; remission.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of remitting, or the state of being remitted; remission. ("Disavowing the remitment of Claudius." — Milton.)
The common-language use of remitment is essentially synonymous with remission in the general sense of sending back, releasing, or canceling. The legal meaning narrows this considerably: in law, remitment is not simply any act of sending back or relieving, but specifically a formal judicial act returning a person to custody, or the formal voiding of a prior legal act. The ordinary usage carries no necessary connection to custody or legal proceedings, creating a gap that can mislead researchers reading historical documents.
Common Confusion
Remitment is easily conflated with three closely related terms:
— REMISSION: Broader term covering forgiveness of debt, reduction of sentence, and release from obligation. Remitment is a subset or species of remission, but not all remissions are remitments.
— REMAND: The modern procedural term for sending a person back to custody or sending a case back to a lower court. In contemporary practice, remand has largely displaced remitment in the custody sense. Researchers encountering remitment in historical sources should understand it as functionally equivalent to what modern sources call remand in that context.
— REMITTER: A distinct doctrine concerning the restoration of a prior superior title or right. Remitter and remitment share a Latin root but operate in entirely different procedural universes. Do not conflate.
Why It Matters in Research
Remitment is a low-frequency term in the Law Mind corpus that carries outsized traps for researchers working with historical materials. Three research considerations apply:
First, the term's currency has declined sharply. In modern legal writing, remand has substantially displaced remitment in the custody sense, and annulment or vacatur has displaced it in the voiding sense. A researcher who searches only for modern equivalents will miss historical uses of remitment. Conversely, a researcher who finds remitment in a nineteenth-century source should not assume it maps perfectly onto any single modern concept without reading context carefully.
Second, all three historical dictionaries in the corpus reproduce essentially the same two-word gloss — "sending back to custody; an annulment" — attributed to Wharton. This suggests the historical sources are not independent but are drawing from a common reference point. The definitions do not elaborate on procedural mechanics, circumstances, or distinctions between the two meanings. Researchers should treat the historical definitions as directional, not dispositive.
Third, the annulment meaning requires particular caution. "Annulment" itself is a multi-sense term in law, and when historical sources describe remitment as an annulment, they may mean something more specific than modern usage implies — closer to a formal judicial voiding of a prior act or order rather than a declaration of nullity from inception.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence give identical definitions, each citing Wharton without further elaboration. The verbatim reproduction across all three sources indicates that none of the standard historical dictionaries in the corpus developed an independent analysis of the term. The citation to Wharton (Francis Wharton's legal works, including his treatise on criminal procedure) is the common thread, but no independent case law or statutory grounding is provided in any of the three entries.
This unanimity is less a sign of settled doctrine than of limited treatment. The historical dictionaries confirm the term's existence and rough contours but offer no guidance on when courts used remitment rather than competing terminology, or how the annulment meaning was applied in practice. Researchers needing substantive procedural history must look beyond the dictionary corpus to primary sources and Wharton's own treatises directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Remitment in the custody sense appears predominantly in English and early American common law sources. Modern American jurisdictions uniformly use remand for the custody-return function. The term may still appear in some state court rules or older statutory texts without having been formally replaced, creating a reading hazard for practitioners consulting historical statutes.