Definition
A day appointed in the English court calendar, falling several days before the end of term, at which matters left unresolved on the affirmance day were completed. The term belongs to pre-modern English appellate procedure and refers specifically to a scheduled session within the writ of error process — the mechanism by which judgments were reviewed before modern appellate courts replaced it. After affirmance day (the day set for affirming or reversing judgments brought up by writ of error), any unfinished business from that session carried over to the adjournment day in error for resolution before the term closed.
The term is essentially procedural and calendrical: it names a slot in the court's working schedule rather than a substantive legal concept or doctrine.
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Common Confusion
The term contains two embedded concepts that researchers may conflate with unrelated procedures. "Adjournment" here does not mean a continuance to a future term or a suspension of proceedings — it refers to a fixed day within the same term designated to wrap up remaining error business. Similarly, "in error" does not describe a mistake; it situates the day within writ of error proceedings specifically, distinguishing it from other days in term. Conflating this with a general adjournment or with modern appellate motion practice will produce research dead ends.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a historical artifact of English common law term-and-day practice and will appear almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English primary sources, treatises on English practice, and American sources that closely tracked English procedure in the early republic. Researchers encountering it in historical records should understand two things:
First, the term presupposes the writ of error system, which organized appellate review around formal term days with designated purposes — affirmance day, adjournment day in error, and so on. This structure was abolished or substantially reformed in England by the Judicature Acts of the 1870s and was never uniformly adopted in American state practice. An American case or treatise using this term is almost certainly drawing directly from English sources or from a jurisdiction that self-consciously modeled its practice on English forms.
Second, the phrase is a compound: it cannot be understood without understanding both affirmance day and the writ of error procedure generally. If a historical record references unfinished business being carried to an "adjournment day in error," the researcher needs to trace what was left open on the prior affirmance day to understand what was at stake.
The Black's Law Dictionary reference to Tidd's Practice (2 Tidd, Pr. 1176) is the authoritative primary pointer. William Tidd's The Practice of the Courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas (multiple editions, early nineteenth century) is the standard English common law practice treatise for this period and the proper place to develop context for this term in any research project touching English or early American writ of error procedure.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the only dictionary entry identified for this term and keeps it appropriately brief: a day appointed before term's end to finish matters left undone on the affirmance day, with the citation to Tidd. This is consistent with the nature of the term — it is a procedural scheduling concept from a defunct system, and there is little doctrinal content to elaborate. No meaningful divergence exists across sources because the sources that address it at all are working from the same English practice tradition.
What historical dictionaries do not provide is the procedural architecture that gives the term meaning. Researchers relying on a dictionary definition alone will understand what the day was called but not how it functioned within the rhythm of a term or how affirmance day and adjournment day in error related to the lifecycle of a writ of error proceeding. For that, Tidd's Practice and comparable English procedural treatises are the necessary next step.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English common law court practice and has no direct analog in modern American or English procedure. American jurisdictions that adopted writ of error practice in the early nineteenth century may have used similar terminology, but the specific term "adjournment day in error" is primarily an English practitioner's phrase. Researchers working in American historical sources should not assume the term carried identical procedural meaning unless the jurisdiction's rules expressly tracked English forms.
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