Definition
"After examining all the business committed to me" is a phrase of completion appearing in arbitration awards. It signals that an arbitrator has discharged the full scope of the authority delegated by the parties—that the arbitrator has reviewed, considered, and adjudicated every matter submitted for decision. The phrase functions as a formal attestation of exhaustion of jurisdiction, not a mere recital of procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical awards or pleadings should recognize it as a term of art tied to the doctrine of arbitral finality. An award was only binding and enforceable if the arbitrator acted within—and fully exercised—the scope of submission. Courts scrutinized whether an arbitrator had actually disposed of every matter referred; failure to do so could render the award void for incompleteness, while exceeding the submission could void it for excess of authority. The phrase served as evidence that neither defect existed.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry indexes this phrase to 8 Mass. 399, indicating it was the subject of judicial construction in early American courts. Researchers working in Massachusetts reports or early arbitration pleadings may encounter the phrase as a standard closing attestation in formal awards. It belongs to a cluster of award-language terms—along with "after him" in wills, "after issue joined" in abatement, and "after payment of my debts" in testamentary construction—that Rapalje & Lawrence treat as phrases requiring case-by-case judicial interpretation rather than fixed legal definitions.
The practical research trap here is treating the phrase as boilerplate. Courts in the early nineteenth century did not. The precise wording of an award's attestation clause could determine its enforceability. Variations in phrasing—whether the arbitrator claimed to have examined "all" the business versus "the" business, or "submitted" versus "committed"—could be argued as evidence of incomplete discharge. Researchers analyzing arbitration disputes from this era should cross-reference the award language against the submission agreement to identify whether a court found a mismatch.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not provide a substantive definition of the phrase. Instead, consistent with their method for phrases of construction, they treat it as a term whose meaning is entirely case-determined and index it to a single Massachusetts authority: 8 Mass. 399. This is characteristic of their approach to award and will language throughout the dictionary—the entry functions as a finding aid to judicial construction rather than as an independent definition. Researchers should not expect analytical guidance from the dictionary entry itself; the authority cited is the substance.
The placement of this entry within a sequence of similarly structured phrase-entries (covering will language and pleading language alongside award language) reflects the nineteenth-century practice of treating formulaic legal phrases as a distinct category of legal meaning requiring independent judicial interpretation. The historical dictionaries as a class do not theorize about why such phrases require construction; they simply record where courts have done so.