1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Adjudication

ADJUDICATION (Lat. adjudicatio; adjudicare, to award), generally, a trying or determining of a case by the exercise of judicial power; a judgment. In a more technical sense, in English and American law, an adjudication is an order of the bankruptcy courts by which a debtor is adjudged bankrupt and his property vested in a trustee. It usually proceeds from a resolution of the creditors or where no composition or scheme of arrangement has been proposed by the debtor. It may be said to consummate bankruptcy, for not till then does a debtor’s property actually vest in a trustee for division among the creditors, though from the first act of bankruptcy till adjudication it is protected by a receiving order. As to the effect which adjudication has on the bankrupt, see under Bankruptcy. The same process in Scots law is called sequestration. In Scots law the term “adjudication” has quite a different meaning, being the name of that action by which a creditor attaches the heritable, i.e. the real, estate of his debtor, or his debtor’s heir, in order to appropriate it to himself either in payment or security of his debt. The term is also applied to a proceeding of the same nature by which the holder of a heritable right, labouring under any defect in point of form, gets that defect supplied by decree of a court.