Definition
An adjournment day is a date set by judges at the close of, or during, regular nisi prius sittings to continue the trial of issues of fact that were not reached or not ready for hearing during the original sitting. Rather than dismissing unheard causes entirely or requiring litigants to wait for the next full term, the court designated a further day on which those matters could be called and tried.
The term operates within the structure of English common-law court practice, where courts sat in fixed terms and at designated circuit locations. When the business of a sitting outran the available time, adjournment days served as a procedural safety valve, preserving the court's jurisdiction over pending matters without the formality of opening an entirely new term.
Common Confusion
Adjournment day should not be confused with the general act of adjourning a session or hearing. A routine adjournment suspends a proceeding to a later time, often the same or next day, within the same sitting. Adjournment day, by contrast, is a formally appointed separate day designated specifically for overflow or unready business from a completed sitting — it carries scheduling and jurisdictional significance within the nisi prius system that an ordinary recess or continuance does not.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical English procedure and appears almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century sources. Researchers encountering it in older English or early American case reports, circuit records, or treatises on common-law practice should understand several things:
First, the term belongs to the nisi prius framework — a system in which central courts commissioned judges to try issues of fact locally before juries. The adjournment day was part of how that system managed its docket across sessions. When nisi prius practice was absorbed into reformed court structures in England (Judicature Acts, 1873–1875) and as American states replaced common-law court terms with continuous-sitting systems during the nineteenth century, adjournment day as a technical term fell out of active use.
Second, the phrase can appear in older American materials, particularly from states that retained formal term-based court structures well into the 1800s. In those jurisdictions, an adjournment day may affect questions of whether a judgment entered on such a day was within the court's jurisdictional authority for that term — a point that could surface in research into the validity or finality of early judgments.
Third, do not conflate sources using "adjournment day" in the English nisi prius sense with modern legislative usage, where "adjournment day" or "day of adjournment" refers to the final day of a legislative session. These are distinct terms of art operating in entirely different contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement: all three define adjournment day as a day appointed by judges at the regular sittings at nisi prius. Rapalje & Lawrence and Black's are essentially identical in language, adding the specification that such days were set to try "issues of fact not then ready for trial." Bouvier's is slightly broader, describing it simply as "a day appointed by the judges at the regular sittings for the trial of causes at nisi prius," without expressly limiting it to matters not previously ready.
The slight divergence between Bouvier's and the other two is minor but potentially useful: Bouvier's framing suggests adjournment days could serve as general continuation days for any cause, not only those unready at the original sitting, while Black's and Rapalje's formulation implies a narrower function — overflow or deferred business specifically. Neither Bouvier's nor the other sources address how these days were formally noticed to litigants or how their scheduling interacted with the court's general term authority, gaps that researchers will need to fill from treatises on nisi prius practice such as Selwyn's Nisi Prius or Tidd's Practice.
None of the three dictionary sources provide American case authority for the term, which is consistent with its predominantly English procedural origin.
Jurisdictional Note
Adjournment day as a formal procedural term belongs to English common-law practice. Its appearance in American legal materials is largely confined to early state court records in jurisdictions that initially replicated English term-based and nisi prius structures — particularly along the eastern seaboard. American procedural reform, accelerated by the Field Code (1848) and subsequent civil procedure codification, rendered the term obsolete in domestic practice.