Definition
A formal pleading phrase used in common law actions to invoke the authority of a specific penal or remedial statute without naming it explicitly. The full phrase typically appears as "according to the statute in such case made and provided" and signals that the plaintiff's claim arises under, and the remedy sought is authorized by, a particular Act of Parliament or legislative enactment applicable to the facts alleged. It is a term of pleading art, not a substantive legal standard.
Common Confusion
This phrase is sometimes conflated with purely formulaic closing language that carries no legal weight. The distinction matters: "according to the statute in such case made and provided" actively grounds the pleading in statutory authority and, if the wrong statute applied or none existed, could defeat the action. It is not interchangeable with general closing formulas such as "against the peace and dignity of the state," which are largely ceremonial.
Researchers should also distinguish between its use in civil declarations (where it identified the statutory basis for a private right of action) and criminal indictments (where it confirmed that the offense was statutory rather than a common law crime). The procedural stakes differed between these contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical pleadings, declarations, or indictments should treat it as a marker pointing to an underlying statute that the pleader has chosen not to name. In English common law practice through the nineteenth century, it was considered sufficient to invoke the statute by this formula rather than cite it by title or chapter—a convention that can obscure which enactment actually governed the case. When tracing the legal basis of an old judgment or examining the sufficiency of a historical indictment, identifying the "statute in such case made and provided" often requires consulting the subject matter of the pleading alongside contemporary statutory compilations.
The phrase also marks a jurisdictional and temporal boundary: it appears most densely in pleadings from the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries and becomes rare as code pleading reforms (beginning in New York with the Field Code of 1848 and spreading across American jurisdictions) displaced the formal language of common law pleading. In American sources after roughly 1850, its appearance is increasingly confined to criminal indictments and specialized statutory actions, where older form books were retained longest.
Corpus researchers should note that "made and provided" is the critical trailing phrase. Rapalje & Lawrence index the substantive entry under MADE AND PROVIDED rather than the full formula, and other historical dictionaries may similarly split or redirect the phrase. Searches limited to the opening words will miss relevant discussion.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treat the operative unit as "MADE AND PROVIDED" and supply case support from both English and American courts—citing Barnwell & Cresswell, East, Lord Raymond, Halsted (New Jersey), and Massachusetts Reports—without expanding on the formula as a whole. The entry is minimalist, confirming the phrase's currency in pleading but offering no analytical discussion of when it was required versus permissive, or what consequences followed from its omission.
Historical dictionaries generally underserve this phrase because it was treated as a matter of form so well-settled that extensive commentary was unnecessary. Bouvier's editions, for example, address sufficiency of statutory pleading under broader entries (such as INDICTMENT or DECLARATION) rather than isolating the formula itself. Researchers relying solely on alphabetical entries under the phrase's opening words may find little; the substantive doctrine lives in pleading treatises—Chitty's Pleading being the most authoritative—rather than in dictionary entries.
One point all sources agree on: the phrase was never mere surplusage. Its inclusion signaled that the plaintiff's or prosecutor's right of action existed by statute rather than at common law, which carried consequences for the form of the remedy, the measure of damages (often fixed by the statute), and the court's jurisdiction in some contexts.