Definition
A Latin phrase used in early English legal reporting meaning "to which the court agreed." It appears at the conclusion of a reported case or legal argument to indicate that the court assented to the proposition stated — typically a point of law argued by counsel or a ruling pronounced from the bench. The phrase functions as a term of art in case reporting, not a substantive legal doctrine in its own right.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English Year Books and their derivatives will encounter this phrase as a signal of judicial endorsement. Its significance lies less in doctrine than in method: when ad quod curia concordavit appears in a Year Book report, it marks the moment a legal proposition passed from argument into authoritative resolution. The distinction matters because Year Book reporting was often structured around the dialogue between counsel and bench, and not every stated proposition carried the court's assent. This phrase is the reporter's shorthand that it did.
Researchers should be alert to two practical traps. First, the phrase appears almost exclusively in pre-modern sources — Year Books, abridgements, and their descendants — and is effectively absent from modern case reporting, where judicial agreement is conveyed by formal opinion language. Seeing this phrase in a secondary source is almost always a signal that the underlying authority is medieval or early modern English. Second, Year Book reports were not official records and varied in reliability; ad quod curia concordavit reflects the reporter's characterization of the court's assent, not a certified transcript. Historical scholarship on Year Book accuracy (see, e.g., the work of the Selden Society) counsels caution about treating any single report as definitive.
The phrase also has modest connective value within the Law Mind corpus: it is a companion to other Latin court-reporting formulae — such as per curiam (by the court) and curia advisari vult (the court wishes to be advised) — that together constitute the vocabulary of pre-modern English judicial records.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's — are in complete agreement, rendering an identical definition ("To which the court agreed") and citing the same source: Yearb. P. 20 Hen. VI. 27 (a Year Book from the Pleadings term of the twentieth year of the reign of Henry VI, circa 1442). The uniformity here is notable: there is no recorded disagreement among lexicographers about meaning or usage, and no evolved or alternative sense to track.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is context for how the phrase functioned within Year Book reporting conventions — they treat it as a translation problem rather than a research problem. Burrill's inclusion of the prefix "L. Lat." (Law Latin) usefully flags the phrase as a term of art rather than classical Latin prose, but none of the sources discuss how frequently the phrase appears, what its absence implies, or how it relates to other reporter's formulae. Researchers should supplement these dictionary entries with secondary literature on Year Book methodology.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is specific to the historical common law tradition of England and jurisdictions that directly inherited early English case-reporting conventions. It has no operative meaning in modern American, Canadian, or Commonwealth jurisprudence except as a historical artifact.