Definition
In old Scots law, an act or condition that is done without law or contrary to law — that is, unlawful conduct or a state of affairs existing outside legal sanction. The term is archaic and appears only in historical Scots legal sources; it carries no distinct technical meaning beyond its literal sense of acting or being against law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term will find it almost exclusively in pre-Union Scots legal records, glossaries of Scottish customary law, or secondary works drawing on Spelman's glossary tradition. It is not a term of art with substantive legal consequences of its own — it functions descriptively, marking conduct or a state as legally unauthorized. Its primary research value is confirmatory: when encountered in a historical document, it signals that the drafter was characterizing something as wrongful or extra-legal under Scots customary law, without necessarily specifying the precise nature of the wrong or the applicable remedy.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that the corpus of old Scots law uses several overlapping terms to describe unlawful conduct, and unlarich does not map cleanly onto any single modern equivalent (wrongful, void, illegal, or ultra vires depending on context). Do not assume the term implies criminality; it may simply mean an act done without proper authority or formality.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary traces the term to Spelman and defines it concisely as that which is done without law or against law in old Scots law. Burrill's Law Dictionary reproduces substantially the same definition. Notably, Burrill's entry appears to have suffered a typographical or editorial corruption: the definition of unlarich is run together in the source with a separate entry for universal legacy (a civil law testamentary term), producing a garbled passage. Researchers relying on Burrill should be aware that the text following the definition of unlarich properly belongs to a distinct entry and has no bearing on the meaning of unlarich itself. Neither dictionary adds substantive elaboration beyond the Spelman citation, and neither identifies case law or statutory authority that employs the term. Both sources are in agreement that the term is purely historical and Scots in origin.
Jurisdictional Note
Unlarich belongs exclusively to pre-modern Scots customary law. It has no recognized meaning in English common law, American law, or modern Scots law. It does not appear in contemporary Scottish legal usage.