Definition
Striking off the roll is the formal removal of an attorney's or solicitor's name from the official register maintained by a court or regulatory body, with the effect of permanently disqualifying that person from practicing law. The phrase is the traditional common-law expression for what American jurisdictions today call disbarment.
The mechanism reflects the historical structure of the English legal profession: courts maintained physical rolls — formal lists of officers admitted to practice before them — and removal from the roll was a literal administrative act with immediate legal consequence. A solicitor struck off could no longer appear, advise clients, or hold themselves out as qualified to practice.
Common Confusion
"Striking off the roll" and "disbarment" are functionally equivalent outcomes but reflect distinct professional structures. In England and Wales, the term applies primarily to solicitors (regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority), while barristers face "disbarment" from their Inn of Court. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably in historical sources, which can mislead researchers expecting a clean terminological division. In American legal writing, "striking off the roll" appears almost exclusively in older opinions and treatises borrowing from English practice; modern U.S. sources use disbarment exclusively.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English legal history before the twentieth century will encounter "striking off the roll" as the operative phrase in disciplinary proceedings against solicitors, while contemporaneous proceedings against barristers may use different language. The terminological split tracks the structural division of the English profession into solicitors and barristers — a division with no precise American counterpart.
In American primary sources, appearance of this phrase is a reliable marker of English-influenced drafting or transplanted common-law reasoning, and its presence in a judicial opinion often signals the court is reasoning by analogy to English professional discipline rather than applying domestic bar rules.
The historical record on this term is thin on procedural detail. Sources from the nineteenth century and earlier treat striking off the roll as a summary judicial power — courts regarded admitted attorneys and solicitors as officers of the court, giving them inherent authority to remove them without the elaborate procedural apparatus that characterizes modern disbarment proceedings. Researchers should not assume that historical "striking off" carried the same procedural safeguards — notice, hearing, right of appeal — that attach to modern disbarment. The procedural framework governing removal evolved substantially across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For corpus researchers tracking attorney discipline across jurisdictions and time periods, this term clusters with related phrases: struck off, removed from the rolls, disbarred, and the earlier English phrase put out of the roll. Each may appear in the same historical sources with subtly different procedural implications.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) defines the term identically and minimally: "the disbarring of an attorney or solicitor." This brevity is consistent with the historical dictionaries' treatment of the term as self-explanatory to practitioners of the era, but it obscures the structural distinction between barristers and solicitors and the procedural character of the act.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is marginally more specific, identifying the act as "removing the name of a solicitor from the rolls of the court and thereby disentitling him to practise," and cross-referencing DISBAR. Bouvier's formulation correctly centers the solicitor (rather than the barrister or the American attorney) and makes explicit the practical consequence — loss of the right to practice — rather than treating removal as an end in itself. The cross-reference to DISBAR in Bouvier signals that by the time of that edition, American legal writing was already treating the two terms as interchangeable.
None of the three historical dictionaries address the procedural requirements for striking off, the grounds that justified it, the right of reinstatement, or the distinction between striking off for misconduct versus striking off at the solicitor's own request (a voluntary removal that also appears in historical records under the same phrase). Researchers relying solely on these definitions will miss those distinctions.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is native to English and Welsh legal usage and retains currency there in solicitor discipline proceedings. In the United States, it is archaic in practice but appears in historical caselaw and treatises. Commonwealth jurisdictions — Australia, Canada, New Zealand — have used the phrase historically and some retain it, though "disbarment" and jurisdiction-specific statutory language increasingly predominate.