Definition
A Latin term with two distinct legal applications:
1. Old Pleading. The Latin verb meaning "to accept," used in formal pleading records. Its conjugated forms appeared directly in English court documents: acceptavit ("he accepted") and non acceptavit ("he did not accept"). These forms functioned as operative terms of art in the pleadings themselves, not merely as descriptive shorthand.
2. Civil Law. To accept; to assent; specifically, to assent to a promise made by another. In this sense the term carries contractual weight, signaling the moment at which one party's assent transforms a bare promise into a binding obligation.
Common Confusion
Researchers encountering acceptare in historical records should not assume it is interchangeable with the English "acceptance" as that term is used in modern contract law. The civil law usage of acceptare describes assent to a promise — a concept closer to the civilian notion of agreement than to the common law doctrine of acceptance as the mirror-image response to an offer. The pleading usage is narrower still, functioning as a verb of record rather than a substantive legal concept.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law records — particularly plea rolls and reported cases from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — will encounter acceptavit and non acceptavit as live pleading language, not as translations. The distinction matters: when a reporter writes that a party "pleaded non acceptavit," the Latin term is the pleading, not a gloss on it. Treating it as merely descriptive risks misreading the procedural posture of the case.
The civil law strand of acceptare connects to natural law theory on promise and obligation. The reference shared across all three source dictionaries — Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book II, Chapter 11, Section 14 — is a real and traceable locus. Grotius there analyzes the binding force of promises and the role of assent, making acceptare part of a broader jurisprudential argument about when obligation arises. Researchers tracing the intellectual genealogy of contract doctrine into natural law sources will find this usage substantively relevant, not merely etymological.
Because the term appears in both common law pleading and civilian jurisprudence, it surfaces in two largely separate bodies of historical material. Do not assume a source indexed under one tradition will cross-reference the other.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in close agreement on both usages, and all three cite the same two authorities: 2 Strange 817 for the pleading usage and Grotius for the civil law usage. The consistency across these dictionaries reflects that acceptare was a settled term with a fixed dual application, not a contested or evolving one.
None of the three sources elaborates on the substantive legal significance of assent in the Grotian sense — they treat it as a definition to be supplied rather than a doctrine to be explained. Researchers seeking the full argument should go directly to Grotius rather than relying on the dictionary entries as anything more than a pointer.
The second edition of Black's contains a typographical artifact ("Im old pleading," "eivil law," "daseute") — artifacts of the scanning or typesetting process — that should not be read as substantive variation from the first edition. The underlying text is identical in meaning.