Definition
A term from old Scots law meaning that which is done without law or contrary to law; also used to denote an unjust law. The word encompasses two related but distinct senses: (1) conduct or action taken outside the authority of law or in direct violation of it, and (2) a law that is itself unjust or illegitimate in character.
Why It Matters in Research
UNLARIOH is an archaic Scots law term with no surviving use in modern legal practice or doctrine. Researchers encountering it will do so almost exclusively in historical Scottish legal sources, particularly pre-Union records, glossaries of Scots law, and Roman law commentaries as filtered through Scottish legal scholarship. Its appearance in Black's 2nd Edition reflects that dictionary's broader coverage of historical and civil law terminology than later editions tend to carry — researchers relying on later editions of Black's may not find it at all.
The dual meaning (unlawful act vs. unjust law) is historically significant. The second sense — an unjust law — touches on natural law theory as absorbed into early Scots legal writing, and aligns with the Roman law tradition that an unjust enactment might not qualify as true law. Researchers tracing the natural law roots of Scottish jurisprudence, or examining how Scots law theorists engaged with Roman and civil law sources, may find this term a useful marker of that intellectual lineage. Spelman's glossary and Mackeldey's Roman law treatise are the attributed sources; both are legitimate historical reference works, and tracing those citations directly is advisable before drawing doctrinal conclusions from secondary summaries.
Do not expect this term to appear in case reporters, statutory indexes, or modern Scots law materials. It belongs to the glossarial and scholarly layer of the historical corpus, not the applied layer.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) supplies the only dictionary entry recovered for this term, attributing its two senses to Spelman (for the first, conduct against law) and to Mackeldey's Roman law commentary (for the second, an unjust law). This split attribution is itself informative: it suggests the term was documented through civilian scholarly channels rather than native Scots common law practice, and that its meaning was not entirely settled even among the sources Black's consulted.
No entry for UNLARIOH appears to have survived into subsequent editions of Black's, which is consistent with the general pruning of obscure historical and civil law terms from later editions. The term is absent from standard modern Scots law glossaries, from the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue corpus references commonly available to legal historians, and from Trayner's Latin Maxims and Phrases, which otherwise covers a substantial range of archaic Scots legal terminology. This gap in coverage means that Black's 2nd Ed. may be the single most accessible dictionary source, and researchers needing depth will need to go directly to Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum or Mackeldey's Handbook of the Roman Law.