Definition
A Latin ablative term meaning "being absent" or "in the absence of." Used in historical legal reports to indicate that a named judge or party was not present during a proceeding or deliberation. When attached to a judge's name, it signals that the opinion or ruling was rendered without that judge's participation — neither their agreement nor their dissent should be attributed to the case.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with English case reports from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will encounter *absente* as a quiet but consequential qualifier. Its significance lies in what it withholds: a judge identified as *absente* did not concur in the holding, and any count of assenting justices must exclude them. Misreading the term — or missing it — can produce an inflated or inaccurate read of a decision's authority, particularly in periods when the unanimity or near-unanimity of a bench carried persuasive weight.
The term appears most commonly in the nominative-ablative construction "[judge's name], absente," following the pattern of the standard example across the source dictionaries: "the three justices, absente North, C.J., were clear of opinion." Here the Chief Justice's absence is noted parenthetically, and the holding belongs only to the three who were present.
Researchers should also be alert to the related construction *absente reo* (the defendant being absent) in criminal proceedings, and *absente parte* (the party being absent), which carry procedural rather than judicial significance. These phrases appear in the same historical corpus and can be confused if the reader is not attentive to what noun the ablative modifies.
Because *absente* belongs to a class of Latin ablative absolutes common in pre-nineteenth-century English law reporting, it will appear without translation or gloss in the original sources. Researchers unfamiliar with Latin case grammar may pass over it or misread its grammatical role.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term: it is Latin, ablative of *absens*, meaning "being absent," and it is characterized uniformly as a common term in the old reports. All three sources anchor the definition with the identical illustrative quotation from 2 Mod. 14.
The convergence across sources is unsurprising — this is a narrow, stable Latin term of art with no contested meaning. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural consequence of the notation: they define the word but leave the reader to infer why it was recorded. The practical implication — that the absent judge's silence carries no jurisprudential weight — is the researcher's work to supply from context.
No meaningful divergence exists between the source dictionaries on this entry.
Jurisdictional Note
*Absente* is a term of English law reporting practice, not a term of any modern jurisdiction's statutory or procedural vocabulary. It appears almost exclusively in the English reporters and materials derived from them. American researchers will encounter it only in cases or treatises citing pre-nineteenth-century English authority.