Definition
A Latin term used in old English court reports meaning "it is adjourned." Adjornatur appears as a brief notation indicating that a case was continued to a future date, typically for further argument, deliberation, or awaiting the court's resolution. The term is closely associated with its adjectival form ADJORNATUS (also spelled ADJURNATUS), which carries the same root meaning — adjourned, or put over to another day.
The term functions as a formulaic entry in court records rather than a substantive legal concept. When a judge hesitated, sought further argument, or reserved judgment, reporters recorded the event with this single word. The phrase sed adjornat' pro resolutione curiae — "but adjourned for the resolution of the court" — is a common elaboration, signaling that the adjournment was specifically for the court to deliberate and reach a decision.
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Common Confusion
ADJORNATUR should not be confused with ADJOURNMENT as a general procedural term. Adjournment in modern practice refers broadly to any postponement of a proceeding, and is governed by court rules with defined procedural requirements. Adjornatur, by contrast, is purely a reporter's notation from the old English manuscript and print tradition — it describes what happened, not a motion made or rule invoked. Researchers encountering it in historical reports should treat it as a status marker in the court record, not as a procedural device with legal elements of its own.
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Why It Matters in Research
This is a historical-reports term, not a living legal concept. Researchers will encounter adjornatur almost exclusively in the old English reporters — particularly Shower's Reports, Modern Reports, and Hardres's Reports — and in materials derived from them. It does not appear in modern pleading, statutes, or procedural rules.
The primary research trap is misreading the notation as a substantive order or ruling. Adjornatur means only that the case was held over; it tells the researcher nothing about why, for how long, or what the eventual outcome was. The fuller phrase sed adjornat' pro resolutione curiae is more informative because it at least identifies that deliberation was the purpose.
A secondary trap involves the spelling variants. The term appears as adjornatur, adjurnatur, and in abbreviated forms (adjornat', adjurnat') across different reporters and manuscript sources. Searches that rely on a single spelling will miss hits in adjacent sources. Researchers working with digitized historical reporters should search multiple spellings and treat the abbreviated forms as equivalent.
The companion form ADJORNATUS functions as a past-participial adjective ("adjourned") and appears in record Latin describing the status of a case or party. Burrill treats both forms under a single entry, which is the correct approach — they are morphological variants of the same term, not distinct legal concepts.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source documenting this term for American legal researchers. Burrill traces the term directly to the old English reporters, quoting Shower's Reports for the standard usage and noting the hesitation notation in Holt C.J.'s era as a characteristic context. His treatment correctly identifies adjornatur as a common term in the old reports rather than a technical doctrine, and the quotations he supplies are genuinely illustrative of how the notation functioned in practice.
No other major historical legal dictionary in the standard American reference shelf — not Black's early editions, not Bouvier — gives this term independent treatment, which is consistent with its character as a reporter's formula rather than a term of art. Researchers should therefore treat Burrill as the authoritative secondary source for this term within the Law Mind corpus.
The historical sources themselves (Shower, Modern Reports, Hardres) are the primary evidence, and Burrill's quotations point researchers directly to those volumes.
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Jurisdictional Note
Adjornatur is specific to the old English common law reporting tradition and has no direct equivalent in American procedural terminology. It does not appear as a term of art in any American jurisdiction.
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