Definition
An abbreviation used in legal texts, digests, and case reports. "Adj." most commonly stands for "adjourned" or "adjudged," depending on context, and appears frequently in older legal citations and court records.
1. Adjourned — indicates that a proceeding, hearing, or session was postponed or continued to another time or date. Found in case reports and docket notations to signal a break in proceedings rather than a final disposition.
2. Adjudged — indicates that a matter was decided or ruled upon by a court. When appearing in citation form (e.g., "adj." following a case name or legal proposition), it signals that the stated rule or principle was directly decided by the court referenced, as distinct from dicta or inference.
3. Adjacent — appears occasionally in property and survey records as a shorthand notation, though this usage is uncommon in formal legal documents.
Common Confusion
The two primary legal uses — "adjourned" and "adjudged" — can be confused when context is absent, and older digests and reporters do not always supply that context. A notation reading "adj. Michaelmas term" signals an adjournment; a notation reading "adj. per curiam" signals a decided point. Researchers working with 18th- and 19th-century English reporters should determine from surrounding text which meaning applies before drawing conclusions about a case's procedural posture or holding.
Why It Matters in Research
This abbreviation appears with some regularity in older English and American reporters, abridgments, and digests, where brevity was a strong editorial value. The risk for researchers is misreading procedural history: a matter noted as "adj." may have been finally decided or merely continued, and conflating the two distorts case analysis.
In American practice, "adjudged" as a term of art carries weight in distinguishing holdings from dicta, so a misread abbreviation can lead a researcher to over- or under-read the precedential value of a cited authority. When working with 19th-century American digests that organize material by alphabetical abbreviation, "adj." may also appear as a cross-reference marker meaning "see also" or pointing to adjacent entries — a third contextual meaning that is essentially editorial rather than legal.
Historical sources indexed under this abbreviation are sparse. Burrill's Law Dictionary does not supply a dedicated entry for "adj." as a standalone term; the abbreviation appears incidentally in surrounding text. Researchers relying solely on historical dictionary sources will find little direct guidance and must resolve ambiguity through context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not treat "adj." as a principal entry. The abbreviation appears in passing within the body of Burrill's text as a space-saving device consistent with 19th-century legal publishing conventions, but no definitional treatment is provided. This is a gap worth flagging: researchers who encounter "adj." in a Burrill cross-reference or in a source from the same period cannot look to Burrill itself for disambiguation.
The abbreviation's dual function — procedural (adjourned) and substantive (adjudged) — was apparently assumed to be self-evident to contemporary legal readers, which suggests that context within the original source was considered sufficient. Modern researchers working at a distance from that convention do not share that assumption and should treat the abbreviation with appropriate caution.
Jurisdictional Note
The "adjudged" usage is more common in English reporters and American sources directly derived from them. American state reporters of the 19th century occasionally preferred "held" or "decided" over "adjudged" as annotation language, meaning "adj." appears with less frequency in some state-level primary sources than in federal or English materials.