Definition
An archaic Law French adverb meaning "likewise" or "in like manner." Used in early common law pleading and reporting to signal that the same rule, holding, or procedural step applied to a parallel party, count, or issue as had just been stated. Functionally equivalent to the Latin *similiter* in pleading contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *semblement* in early English law reports or plea rolls should treat it as a structural signal, not a substantive term. Its presence indicates that something stated immediately before — a ruling, a procedural disposition, a joinder — applies equally to what follows. Misreading it as a term of art with independent legal content will distort the meaning of the passage.
The term appears almost exclusively in pre-eighteenth-century English materials where Law French remained the working language of pleading and reporting. By the time of the modern reports it had been displaced entirely by English equivalents or by the Latin *similiter*, which itself carried specific procedural weight in the context of issue joinder (where a party "likewise" joins an issue tendered by the opponent). Researchers working in Year Books, early abridgments, or Selden Society editions should be alert to this term and its cousins (*semblablement*, *sembler*) appearing in cognate roles.
Because Burrill cites 11 Mod. 218 as authority, the term was still appearing in reports as late as the Modern Reports series (covering roughly 1669–1732), suggesting it persisted at the margins of legal writing well after Law French had ceased to be standard pleading language. A researcher who encounters the term in a later manuscript or digest entry should consider whether the source is itself quoting or paraphrasing an earlier authority rather than using live Law French.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary-level treatment in the Law Mind corpus. His entry is minimal: the Law French term, its Latin equivalent (*similiter*), the English gloss ("likewise"), and a single report citation. This brevity is appropriate — *semblement* is a function word, not a term with contested doctrinal content. There is nothing to synthesize across competing sources because no competing sources address it. The entry's value lies entirely in the gloss and the citation, which together confirm the term's meaning and its survival into the early eighteenth-century reports.
What Burrill does not address — and what no standard historical law dictionary does in detail — is the procedural significance of *similiter* as a term of art in common law pleading, which *semblement* approximates but does not fully replicate. Researchers who need to understand the formal pleading act of tendering and joining issue by *similiter* should not rely on this entry alone; that doctrine requires consulting pleading treatises directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Confined to English common law materials. No American jurisdictional usage identified; the term had no operative role in American practice by the time of the founding.