Definition
VEER is not a substantive legal term in modern law. In old English and Law French legal usage, it carried two distinct meanings drawn from different Latin roots:
1. (From Lat. videre) To see. Used in archaic legal texts to denote visual perception or the ability to sight something. The phrase jesques à taunt que home pusse veer les estoilles en la firmament — "until a man may see the stars in the sky" — appeared in Britton as a poetic measure of nighttime, relevant to questions of time-of-day in criminal or procedural contexts.
2. (From Lat. vadere) To go; to proceed. Used in directives or narrative passages in Law French records. En evant veer meant "to go forward." Veet la coroner meant "let the coroner go." Qui il veet quite meant "that he go quit" — i.e., that he depart acquitted or discharged.
The two senses are etymologically unrelated and context-dependent. Neither survives as operative legal language in modern practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To let out a sail-line; to allow a sheet to run out. Also used generally (in nautical and non-nautical contexts) to mean changing direction, especially of wind.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To change direction; to turn; to shift — primarily of wind or a vessel's course. "To veer and haul" was a nautical phrase describing variation in wind direction.
The gap between common and legal meaning here runs in an unusual direction: the legal uses of VEER bear no relationship to the nautical or directional senses familiar from ordinary English. A researcher encountering veer in a Law French document should not import any sense of turning or shifting — the term is either "to see" or "to go," depending entirely on context and Latin root.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, Year Books, or early treatises such as Britton will occasionally encounter veer embedded in Law French passages. The risk is misreading it through the lens of the modern English word, which carries directional or nautical connotations entirely foreign to its legal usage.
Two traps are especially common. First, the two legal senses (seeing vs. going) are homophones in Law French and must be distinguished by context and by the surrounding Latin or French syntax. Second, neither sense will appear in modern legal indexes or digests — the term is purely archaic and has no doctrinal life of its own. It functions as connective tissue in procedural or narrative passages, not as a term of art.
Corpus researchers should also note the overlap with the related form veier, which Burrill cross-references. Variant spellings in manuscript sources (veer, veier, veet as a conjugated form) require paleographic attention when transcribing or searching.
The substantive legal content in passages containing veer typically lies elsewhere — in the noun or verb governing the clause (e.g., the coroner's role, the condition of acquittal, the temporal standard). VEER itself is the vehicle, not the destination.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary — and for practical purposes, the only — anglophone legal dictionary source for this term. Burrill handles it efficiently, distinguishing the two Latin roots and providing illustrative quotations from Britton and Kelham's Norman-French dictionary. The entries are brief but accurate.
No other major historical legal dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's early editions, Tomlin's Law Dictionary) carry substantive entries for veer as a legal term. This absence is itself informative: by the time those dictionaries were compiled, Law French had receded sufficiently that purely connective Law French vocabulary was no longer considered worth recording as legal terminology. Burrill's coverage reflects his broader commitment to archaic and comparative sources.
Modern legal dictionaries do not include the term.
Jurisdictional Note
Relevant only to English legal history. No American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdiction developed independent usage of this Law French term.