Definition
A repeller, in historical legal usage, is a person or principle that operates to exclude or thrust back — particularly, to bar an infamous person from taking an oath or giving testimony. The term appears primarily in the Latin maxim *Repellitur a sacramento infamis*: an infamous person is repelled from an oath, meaning disqualified from being sworn as a witness. The term could also carry a narrow procedural sense from Law French, signifying a demand to recover or reclaim something (*repeler*: to demand back), though this usage is rare and confined to early common law pleading contexts.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Something that repels; that which causes repulsion.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who, or that which, repels.
The common meaning is purely physical or figurative — a mosquito repeller, a force that drives something away. The legal meaning is narrower and technical: a rule or maxim operating to exclude a person from legal participation, specifically the giving of sworn testimony. The "repelling" here is juridical disqualification, not physical force.
Common Confusion
"Repeller" as a standalone noun is rarely used in modern legal writing; researchers encountering it in historical texts should distinguish two distinct uses: (1) the evidentiary disqualification sense tied to the maxim *Repellitur a sacramento infamis*, and (2) the Law French procedural sense of demanding something back (*repeler*). These are unrelated in origin and application, though both appear in Burrill under the same headword. Conflating them — or reading either through a modern physical lens — will distort the meaning of the source.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially a historical artifact. Researchers will encounter "repeller" or its cognates almost exclusively in pre-modern sources — Bracton, Britton, Coke on Littleton, and treatises drawing on them. Its significance lies almost entirely in the maxim it anchors: *Repellitur a sacramento infamis*.
That maxim had real doctrinal weight. Under early English common law, a person convicted of certain crimes — forgery, perjury, fraud, and other offenses carrying a mark of infamy — was rendered incompetent to testify. The rule was not merely a credibility consideration for the jury; it was a threshold bar to sworn testimony altogether. Burrill flags that this was "a leading maxim in the law of evidence" that was "very recently abrogated in England by statute" — a reference to the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century (the Evidence Act 1843 and successor legislation) that progressively dismantled testimonial incompetency rules and shifted infamy from a bar to a credibility issue.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, the practical traps are these:
First, temporal sensitivity is acute. A treatise written before English statutory reform will treat infamy as an absolute disqualifier; a treatise written after will treat it as grounds for impeachment only. The same rule will appear in American sources with varying dates of state-level abrogation, because American jurisdictions did not move in unison.
Second, the Law French sense (*repeler* — to demand back) connects to pleading and restitution vocabulary in early Year Book and Bracton material. Researchers tracing property recovery or restitution claims in medieval sources may encounter this usage in a context entirely unrelated to witness competency.
Third, because "repeller" as a noun is uncommon even in historical legal writing, it often appears embedded in Latin maxims or Law French phrases rather than as a freestanding term. Keyword searches for "repeller" alone will likely underperform; searching the maxim *Repellitur a sacramento infamis* or the phrase "repelled from an oath" will return more complete results.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term. His entry captures both senses — the Law French procedural meaning and the evidentiary maxim — and provides the key citations: Bracton (fol. 185) and Coke on Littleton (158a). These are the authoritative primary sources for the infamy-as-disqualification doctrine at common law.
Burrill's note that the maxim was "very recently abrogated in England by statute" establishes this entry as written in the mid-nineteenth century reform period, giving it useful historical positioning. He treats the maxim as a leading principle, not a minor technicality — consistent with its treatment in Coke and earlier authorities.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry a dedicated entry for "repeller" as a noun. Researchers relying solely on other shelf sources will need to locate the doctrine through the Latin maxim rather than the English term. This is a gap worth noting: the concept is substantively important but terminologically scattered across Latin, Law French, and English formulations depending on the source era.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions largely inherited the common law bar on testimony by infamous persons but abrogated it at different times through different mechanisms — some by statute, some by constitutional provision, some by judicial decision. The federal common law position tracked English reform; modern federal and state rules treat prior convictions as impeachment material, not as competency bars.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Witnesses; Competency of Witnesses; Infamy as Disqualification