Definition
A reversor is a person who holds a right of reversion in property — that is, one to whom ownership or possession will return upon the occurrence of a specified condition or the termination of a limited estate. The term appears in two related but distinct contexts:
1. In Scots law specifically, a reversor is the debtor who executes a wadset (the Scottish equivalent of a mortgage) and to whom the right of reversion is granted — meaning the debtor retains the right to reclaim the property upon repayment of the debt secured by the wadset.
2. More generally in older legal usage, reversor is a synonym for reversioner — any person entitled to receive an estate in reversion after the expiration of a particular estate granted to another.
---
Common Confusion
REVERSOR and REVERSIONER are used interchangeably in many historical sources, but the terms carry a distinction worth noting. Reversioner is the more general term and became the dominant form in English common law practice. Reversor is the older and more technically precise usage, surviving especially in Scots law in connection with the wadset, where it specifically identified the debtor-grantor who retained the reversionary right. In English common law sources after the eighteenth century, reversor largely disappeared in favor of reversioner, making the term a reliable marker of either Scots law context or earlier English legal writing.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering reversor in a historical document should treat it as a jurisdictional and chronological signal. In a Scots law document, reversor points immediately to the wadset transaction and the debtor's retained redemption right — a structure that parallels the English mortgage with equity of redemption but operates under distinct Scots legal principles. Conflating the two without accounting for the jurisdictional difference will produce analytical errors.
In English common law sources, reversor is largely archaic by the nineteenth century. If you encounter it in an English text, the document is likely pre-1800 or is borrowing from an older vocabulary. Later English sources will almost universally use reversioner. Law Mind corpus researchers searching for discussions of reversionary interests in English property law should therefore include both spellings and expect reversor to thin out in sources after roughly 1750.
The Scots law dimension also means that reversor connects to a body of writing on the wadset that has no direct English common law parallel. Erskine's Institutes (the source Bouvier cites) is the authoritative Scots institutional text on the subject. Any corpus research touching Scottish property transactions, debt instruments, or heritable security before the Conveyancing (Scotland) Act 1874 effectively abolished the traditional wadset will need to engage with this vocabulary.
One additional trap: do not confuse the right of reversion held by a reversor with the right of redemption held by a mortgagor in English equity. They are conceptually analogous — both allow a debtor to reclaim property upon paying a debt — but they arise from different legal frameworks and carry different procedural consequences.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary source for this term in the Anglo-American legal dictionary tradition, and its entry is brief. Bouvier draws on two authorities: Erskine's Institutes of the Law of Scotland (Book 2, Title 8, Section 1) for the Scots law meaning, and Jacob's Law Dictionary for the synonymous use as reversioner. The entry's brevity reflects the term's limited circulation in American legal practice — the wadset was a distinctly Scottish instrument with no direct American counterpart, and the general sense (reversioner) was superseded by that more common term in everyday usage.
What historical dictionaries do not adequately address is the doctrinal mechanics of the reversor's position in Scots law: the reversor held a personal right of reversion that could ripen into a real right upon redemption, a distinction that mattered considerably in questions of the reversor's creditors or assignees. Researchers needing that level of detail must go directly to Erskine rather than rely on dictionary sources.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The term carries its most precise technical meaning in Scots law, where it is tied to the wadset transaction. In English and American common law, reversor is effectively obsolete as a term of art, replaced by reversioner. Researchers working across Scottish and English sources in the same project should be alert to this divergence to avoid false equivalences.
---