Definition
The deliberation, consideration, or consultation undertaken by a court following the argument of a cause by counsel and before delivering its opinion. A matter is said to be "under advisement" when the court has heard argument but has not yet issued its ruling, having reserved decision for further reflection.
The phrase "under advisement" is the operative form in modern practice. When a judge takes a case under advisement, argument is closed but judgment is suspended — sometimes briefly, sometimes for weeks or months. The period of advisement may be explicitly announced from the bench or simply implied by the court's failure to rule immediately.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Consideration or deliberation; also advice or counsel.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Counsel, advice, information (noted as archaic); also consideration, deliberation, and consultation.
The common meaning of advisement — as counsel or advice given to someone — is essentially the reverse of the legal meaning. In law, advisement is not advice rendered outward but deliberation conducted inward: it is what the court does before speaking, not what a party says to inform the court. A layperson who reads that a judge "took the matter under advisement" may reasonably but incorrectly infer that the judge received advice from someone, rather than that the judge reserved the decision for independent reflection.
Common Confusion
Advisement is sometimes loosely conflated with continuance or deferral. These are distinct. A continuance postpones a proceeding to a future date. Taking a matter under advisement closes argument and reserves only the decision; the proceeding itself is not continued. Researchers working with older court records should also avoid conflating advisement with submission — submission is the act of placing a cause before the court for decision, while advisement is the court's internal deliberative state that follows.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "under advisement" appears with high frequency in judicial opinions, court minutes, and procedural records across the full temporal range of the Law Mind corpus. Its meaning has been stable, but its prominence as a phrase shifts: older materials (pre-twentieth century) more often use the noun advisement alone or in Latin and Law French forms; modern materials almost exclusively use the compound "under advisement."
Researchers using historical court records should watch for variant spellings and Latinized forms — advisamentum, avisement — particularly in English and early American sources. Burrill's citation to Dyer 31b anchors this usage in the English Year Books tradition, suggesting the term carried the same procedural meaning well before American courts adopted it.
The term has no meaningful jurisdictional variation in its core sense, but courts differ in whether they are required to rule within a specific time after taking a matter under advisement. Some states impose statutory time limits on judicial advisement periods; researchers examining delay or judicial conduct issues should check whether such rules apply in the relevant jurisdiction and era.
Advisement appears in contexts beyond trial courts: appellate panels, arbitral tribunals, and administrative law judges all use the phrase. The research implication is that "under advisement" in a historical record does not itself identify the forum.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on the same core meaning: deliberation or consultation by a court after argument and before decision. The definition is stable and consistent across Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's. This uniformity is notable — few terms present such clean agreement across the shelf.
Burrill adds the most texture, providing the Latin and Law French forms (advisamentum, avisement) and the Dyer citation, situating the term in its English common law lineage. Black's second edition adds Clark v. Read as a supporting case reference, though the definition itself is unchanged from the first edition.
Bouvier's treatment is the most compressed — "consideration; deliberation; consultation" — which is accurate but omits the specifically judicial context that the other dictionaries capture. Researchers relying on Bouvier's alone would have a thinner picture of how the term functioned in procedural practice.
None of the historical dictionaries address the compound phrase "under advisement," which is the dominant modern form. This is a gap worth noting: the phrase itself became more formulaic over time, and historical dictionaries predate the standardization of that phrasing in American procedural practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is used uniformly across American federal and state courts and carries the same meaning in each. Some jurisdictions impose time limits (statutory or by court rule) within which a judge must rule after taking a matter under advisement; these limits vary and may affect research into judicial conduct, mandamus practice, or procedural delay in specific jurisdictions and periods.