Definition
"TEM" is a historical legal abbreviation and Latin shorthand appearing in old English and Anglo-Norman legal texts with at least three distinct uses:
1. TEME (You distrain the late sheriff). A common law writ directed against a sheriff who had left office before fulfilling a court-ordered duty — most typically, before bringing in the body of a defendant in custody or completing a sale of goods seized under a fieri facias. Because the departing sheriff could no longer be compelled directly, the writ issued against his successor, directing the successor to distrain the former sheriff's goods as compulsion to perform the outstanding obligation. The writ belonged to the enforcement machinery surrounding writs of execution and process to compel appearance.
2. TENOREM SEQUENTEM (According to the tenor following). A Latin phrase appearing in old pleading and practice books signifying that the very words referred to — a document, grant, or instrument — were being set out verbatim in what followed. Its function was authenticating and incorporative: it flagged that the text reproduced was intended as an exact transcription rather than a paraphrase or summary.
3. TEAM (archaic variant form). Burrill notes "tem" as a Saxon variant of "team" (q.v.), appearing in conjunction with "toll" in the phrase "toll & tem" in Bracton — referencing the franchise right of team (the lord's right to vouch to warranty villein tenants and to hold a court for certain pleas involving bondmen and cattle). This usage is confined to the earliest stratum of English feudal law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): TEM is a scientific initialism for "transmission electron microscope" or "transmission electron microscopy."
Historical common usage: No entry in Webster's 1913. The abbreviation had no general-vocabulary standing.
Editorial note: The scientific initialism has no connection to the legal uses. A researcher encountering "TEM" in a legal manuscript or digest should not interpret it through a modern lens. The legal uses are entirely context-dependent abbreviations for Latin phrases or archaic Saxon terms.
Common Confusion
The three legal uses of "TEM" are easily conflated because they share a spelling but have entirely different functions and legal contexts. The writ (teme/temet) belongs to execution process; the phrase tenorem sequentem belongs to pleading and document transcription; the team variant belongs to feudal franchise law. Black's entry "See FEUDAL SYS" alongside the writ entry may cause researchers to assume a feudal connection to the writ, but that cross-reference is a separate entry on feudal system, not a gloss on the writ.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers using Law Mind's historical corpus will encounter "TEM" in several incompatible contexts with no uniform expansion. The critical navigational point is that meaning depends entirely on the document type and period:
— In execution-related writs and process books, TEM almost certainly abbreviates the writ against the outgoing sheriff. Black's and Burrill agree on this usage and cite to standard common law authorities (3 Stephen's Commentaries, Blackstone's Commentaries).
— In pleading books, Year Books, and early reports, "tenorem sequentem" signals verbatim reproduction of an instrument. Identifying this usage prevents misreading a passage as summary when it is in fact a direct quote.
— In Bracton and the very earliest feudal texts, "tem" as a team variant appears only in the compound "toll & tem" and should be followed to the TEAM entry for full treatment of that franchise.
The writ against the late sheriff is also historically time-sensitive: it presupposes a system of fixed sheriffal terms and successor-officer liability that evolved substantially from medieval practice through the early modern period. Sources written before unified process reforms will describe this writ as a live instrument; later sources treat it as obsolete.
Researchers should also be alert to the abbreviation "temet" (distrain yourself, the late sheriff) in some sources, which is the same writ rendered differently.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's provides two separate entries under "TEM": the writ definition (with citations to Blackstone and Stephen) and a bare cross-reference to "FEUDAL SYS," which is likely a truncated entry for team or a misplaced cross-reference rather than a substantive definition. Burrill expands the writ definition usefully, clarifying that the writ ran to the successor sheriff, and separately notes the Saxon team variant with citation to Bracton. Bouvier covers "tenorem sequentem" in isolation, citing Salkeld and Lord Raymond, and does not address the writ at all. None of the three historical dictionaries consolidates all three uses under a single entry, which is itself a research trap: a search for "TEM" in any one source will return only partial coverage of the term's range.
Jurisdictional Note
The writ teme is a feature of English common law and has no direct American parallel. American states abolished or restructured execution process through the nineteenth century, and the specific machinery of compelling a departed sheriff by distress against his successor was not carried forward in most jurisdictions.