Definition
Termes de la Ley (Law French: "terms of the law") refers to a historical law dictionary and lexicon of Law French legal terminology, first compiled in the sixteenth century and attributed to John Rastell. The work catalogued the technical vocabulary of English legal practice during the period when Law French — a specialized dialect of Norman French — served as the dominant language of the English common law courts, pleadings, and legal literature. As a reference work, Termes de la Ley was among the earliest English legal dictionaries, providing practitioners and students with definitions of the technical terms they would encounter in the Year Books, plea rolls, and court proceedings. The title itself functions as both the name of this specific work and as a descriptive phrase meaning the specialized vocabulary of the law as a body.
Common Confusion
The phrase Termes de la Ley can function in two distinct ways: as a proper noun naming Rastell's dictionary, and as a common noun phrase meaning the technical terms of the law as a collective body. Historical writers sometimes used the phrase in the second, more general sense without intending a reference to any particular work. Context will usually clarify which meaning is intended, but researchers citing a "reference to Termes de la Ley" in a historical source should confirm whether the author means the dictionary specifically or is simply invoking the concept of legal terminology.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will most often encounter this phrase in one of two contexts: as a direct bibliographic reference to Rastell's dictionary, or as a general descriptor for the Law French and Latin terminology embedded throughout pre-modern English legal sources.
The practical significance is substantial. Law French did not die out uniformly — it lingered in court formulas, pleading language, and legal maxims well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and traces persist in modern legal vocabulary (voir dire, estoppel, tort, lien, and dozens of others). A researcher working with Year Books, early common law treatises, or any source predating the English language reforms of the late seventeenth century will encounter terms that are neither modern English nor classical Latin. Termes de la Ley — the work — is the original reference point for decoding that vocabulary.
The dictionary itself went through numerous editions and expansions over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which means the version a historical source consulted may differ from later printings. Researchers should not assume uniformity across editions. Later legal dictionaries, including Cowell's Interpreter and ultimately Jacob's Law Dictionary, drew heavily on Rastell's framework and sometimes reproduced definitions without attribution.
When historical dictionaries simply cross-reference Rastell (as Rapalje & Lawrence does here), this is a signal that the term functions primarily as a proper noun — the name of a work — rather than as a legal doctrine or concept requiring independent definition. Researchers should treat such cross-references as bibliographic pointers, not substantive definitions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the phrase functionally: "terms of the law" and identifies it as the name of a lexicon of Law French words and other technicalities of legal language. This is accurate but spare. Rapalje & Lawrence offers nothing beyond a redirect to Rastell, treating the entry as purely bibliographic.
Neither dictionary provides context about the work's authorship, editions, or influence — a gap that matters for researchers. John Rastell (c. 1475–1536), a lawyer, printer, and playwright connected to the circle of Thomas More, is the figure most commonly associated with the earliest version of the work. The dictionary was expanded by later editors and republished repeatedly, which complicates attribution. Historical sources that cite "Termes de la Ley" without specifying an edition may be drawing on substantially different texts.
The historical dictionaries agree on the core identification — this is a reference work, not a doctrine — but neither addresses how the phrase is sometimes used loosely to mean the technical vocabulary of the law generally, rather than Rastell's specific text. Researchers should be alert to this ambiguity in older secondary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the English common law tradition and its American inheritance. Civil law jurisdictions developed their own technical vocabulary through Roman law channels and have no analog to this particular reference work.