Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning effect, practice, or use — most commonly encountered in legal texts in the phrase "mis en ure" (put into practice; carried into effect) or "put in ure" (put into use or operation). The term signals that a right, power, statute, or legal instrument has been actively exercised or brought to bear, as opposed to lying dormant or theoretical.
URE does not designate a standalone legal concept; it functions as a term of operation appearing within phrases that describe the activation or practical exercise of a legal authority.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Use, practise, exercise.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Use; practice; exercise. [Obs.] — Webster notes the word as obsolete in general English, citing Fuller and Chapman: "Let us be sure of this, to put the best in ure / That lies in us."
The gap here is minimal in substance — common and legal meanings align closely — but the context is essential. In legal sources, URE almost never appears alone. It appears inside fixed Latin-French phrases that carry procedural or operative weight, signaling legal activation rather than mere usage in an everyday sense. A researcher encountering "mis en ure" in a historical document needs to recognize it as a technical signal of legal execution, not casual synonymy with "use."
Why It Matters in Research
URE is a term researchers encounter, not a term they search for. It appears embedded in older English and Anglo-Norman legal texts, particularly in statutes, conveyancing instruments, and early common law commentary. The phrase "put in ure" signals that a statute, right, or power is being described as actively operative — this distinction matters when interpreting the scope or timing of legal authority in historical documents.
The primary research trap: URE appears in the Law Mind corpus almost exclusively in archaic phrases. A full-text search on "ure" alone will return noise — including the suffix "-ure" in words like "tenure," "seizure," and "foreclosure." Researchers should search for the complete phrases: "mis en ure," "put in ure," or "en ure."
A secondary trap: the two Black's entries for URE conflate it with an entry for a standard of weights and measures ("a weight or measure fixed and prescribed by law"). These are distinct entries that appear adjacent in the dictionary and should not be read together. The weights-and-measures definition is unrelated to the Law French URE.
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the most useful historical source for this term, citing both Kelham's Norman-French dictionary and an early English reporter (1 Leon. 90) alongside Stat. 13 Eliz. c. 5, which grounds the phrase in verifiable statutory context.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the same core meaning: Black's (both editions) and Burrill all define URE as Law French for "effect; practice," and all cite Kelham as authority. Burrill adds the most documentary texture, citing 1 Leonard 90 and the Elizabethan statute, giving researchers an anchor in primary sources.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entries provided under this heading are misattributed in the source material — the text there concerns mortgage foreclosure and unrelated terms, and does not bear on URE. Researchers relying on Rapalje & Lawrence for this term should treat those passages as indexing artifacts rather than substantive definitions.
Webster's 1913 confirms the term was already considered obsolete in general English by the nineteenth century, which explains why it persists only in historical legal contexts and specialized glossaries. No modern legal dictionary treats URE as an active term of art; its appearance in contemporary research will almost always be in a historical or comparative law context.