Definition
"Tard" does not appear as a legal term of art in any recognized jurisdiction. It is not a term defined by statute, common law doctrine, or legal convention. The entry in Rapalje & Lawrence that appears in the source material is a digitization or indexing artifact: the text supplied under "TARD" is in fact the definition for ACCESS (of husband), a recognized evidentiary and family law term. The truncated label "tard" most likely represents a corrupted or misfiled index entry, possibly from a damaged or misread page header, running title, or catalog error.
Researchers encountering "tard" in a legal index or database should treat it as a non-entry and investigate whether the surrounding content belongs to a neighboring term — most likely ACCESS, RETARD, or ATTAINDER, depending on context.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person with mental retardation; colloquially, a person who acts stupidly.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an independent entry. The root appears in "tardy" (slow, late, sluggish) and in the verb "to retard" (to delay or hinder).
Editorial note: The colloquial modern usage carries significant social and legal weight in disability law contexts — particularly under the Americans with Disabilities Act and analogous statutes — but "tard" itself has never functioned as a legal term. Any researcher who encounters it in a legal source should not assume it carries doctrinal meaning. It is offensive in contemporary usage and would not appear in formal legal writing.
---
Common Confusion
The source material supplied for this entry is the definition for ACCESS (of husband), not for any term called "tard." This confusion is almost certainly the product of an OCR error, a damaged source scan, or a miscoded catalog index. Rapalje & Lawrence's A Dictionary of American and English Law (1883) does not contain a standalone entry for "tard." Researchers relying on digitized versions of historical legal dictionaries should be alert to this class of artifact, in which a page fragment, running header, or cut-off word from an adjacent entry is treated as an independent headword.
If the research need concerns the substantive content that appeared under this source entry — husband's access in bastardy proceedings and the statute of frauds — see ACCESS.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This entry exists primarily as a warning flag for Law Mind corpus researchers. Digitized historical legal dictionaries, including Rapalje & Lawrence, are subject to OCR misreads, binding truncations, and catalog misfiling that can generate ghost headwords — apparent terms that have no independent legal existence. "Tard" is a textbook example.
When a search returns a term that (1) has no definition of its own, (2) whose source text clearly belongs to a different headword, and (3) appears in no other legal authority, the appropriate response is to discard the headword and recover the underlying content under the correct term. In this case, the substantive material involves ACCESS in the context of husband-and-wife evidence rules and bastardy proceedings — a topic with genuine historical legal significance traceable through the English case law cited in the source (East, Starkie, Barnwell & Alderson reporters).
Researchers working on legitimacy, bastardy, or marital access doctrine in early nineteenth-century English and American law should navigate directly to ACCESS and consult the primary reporter citations embedded in the Rapalje & Lawrence source text.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not define "tard." The text attributed to this headword in the source material is the definition for ACCESS (of husband), referencing Starkie on Evidence, Barnwell & Alderson, Barnwell & Cresswell, and the English nisi prius reporters. These are legitimate primary sources for nineteenth-century evidentiary rules on spousal access in bastardy determinations and the statute of frauds.
No other historical legal dictionary — including Black's, Bouvier's, or Burrill's — contains an entry for "tard" as a legal term.
---