Definition
An agreed case is a formal, written statement of the material facts of an actual legal dispute, signed by the parties and submitted to a court for a ruling on questions of law. The court decides the legal issues based solely on the stipulated facts, without trial, and the result is enforceable as a judgment.
The mechanism works like this: the parties have a real controversy — one that could support a civil action — but they do not dispute the underlying facts. Rather than litigate through pleadings, discovery, and trial, they reduce the operative facts to a written instrument, agree on its accuracy, and ask the court to say what the law requires on those facts. The court issues a ruling, typically with full binding effect, including the right of appeal.
An agreed case is distinct from an advisory opinion. Courts entertaining agreed cases are resolving genuine disputes between real parties with real stakes — the agreed statement simply substitutes for the usual fact-finding process.
Common Confusion
Three related devices are often conflated: the agreed case, the case stated, and the case made. These terms have overlapping historical usage and are sometimes used interchangeably in older sources, but distinctions exist. A case stated and case made are alternate names for essentially the same procedure as an agreed case. However, in some jurisdictions and historical periods, case stated referred specifically to a procedure on appeal or after verdict where the judge summarized facts for a reviewing court, rather than a pre-trial stipulation of facts by the parties. Researchers should not assume uniform usage across jurisdictions or time periods. When encountering any of these terms in historical sources, examine the procedural posture carefully.
An agreed case should also be distinguished from a consent judgment or an agreed decree, which resolve both the facts and the legal outcome by agreement of the parties. In an agreed case, the parties agree on facts but leave the legal outcome to the court.
Why It Matters in Research
The agreed case is a procedural device, and its appearance in primary sources signals something important: the parties in that case were not fighting about what happened — only about what the law says. This affects how you read and use those decisions. Holdings from agreed cases can be among the cleaner statements of legal doctrine precisely because the court is not filtering its analysis through disputed facts.
Researchers working in historical sources will encounter agreed case, case stated, and case made as apparent synonyms, but the procedural rules governing each label varied by jurisdiction and era. In some nineteenth-century American jurisdictions, the agreed case procedure was a statutory creation with specific formality requirements; in others, it was a matter of common law practice. Whether a stipulation that falls short of those requirements has binding effect on the parties — or can be treated as a consent judgment — is a question that turns on the specific jurisdiction's rules.
Modern federal practice has largely absorbed this procedure into the stipulated facts mechanism under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the label agreed case is rarely used in contemporary federal litigation. In state courts, particularly in tax, administrative, and business disputes, variations of the procedure survive under different names. Researchers working across eras should be alert to the terminological shift.
One research trap: some older decisions resolved under the agreed case procedure were decided on stipulations that the parties later argued were incomplete or that omitted a legally material fact. Courts in those cases sometimes refused to render judgment, holding the submission defective. The fact that a case was resolved on agreed facts does not mean the agreement was uncontested after the fact.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's defines an agreed case as a formal written statement of all material facts of a real controversy, signed by the parties, submitted to a court for rulings of law enforceable by judgment, citing 1 Encyclopedia of Pleading and Practice 385. Bouvier's expressly identifies case made and case stated as alternative names for the same device.
The Bouvier's definition is accurate as a structural description but understates the jurisdictional variation in how the procedure operated. The requirement that the controversy be one that "might be the subject of a civil action" was a meaningful threshold — courts declined to entertain agreed cases on hypothetical or purely academic questions. This connection to actual justiciability is implicit in Bouvier's definition but worth making explicit for researchers, since it is the feature that distinguishes the agreed case from a request for an advisory opinion.
Bouvier's does not address the procedural consequences of a defective submission or the requirements for appealability, both of which generated considerable litigation in the nineteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
The agreed case procedure is primarily a feature of state court practice and varies significantly across jurisdictions. Some states codified it by statute; others recognized it only as a common law practice. Federal courts largely replaced the procedure with the stipulated facts mechanism under modern procedural rules, and the term agreed case is uncommon in contemporary federal practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Contracts -- Indefiniteness and Agreement to Agree (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia) [relevant when the agreed case procedure is used to resolve a dispute about the legal effect or enforceability of contract terms].