Definition
A supplementary writ issued in English outlawry proceedings when the original writ of exigent could not be completed within the required number of county court sessions. Specifically, the allocatur exigent issued when the sheriff returned that fewer than five county courts had been held between the teste (the date of issuance) of the original exigent and its return day — meaning the original writ had run out of time before the requisite proclamations could be made. The allocatur exigent allowed the outlawry process to continue by effectively granting a new writ to pick up where the original left off. Burrill characterizes it as being in the nature of an alias writ — that is, a second attempt at process where the first was frustrated by procedural circumstance rather than substantive defect.
The term combines "allocatur" (Latin: it is allowed — a notation indicating judicial approval or allowance of a proceeding) with "exigent," the writ commanding the sheriff to demand the defendant's appearance at successive county courts under penalty of outlawry.
Common Confusion
The allocatur exigent is easily confused with the exigent simpliciter (the original writ of exigent) or the alias exigent. The distinction matters: the alias exigent issued as a general second writ, while the allocatur exigent had a specific triggering condition — the sheriff's return showing an insufficient number of county court sessions. Researchers should not assume that any secondary exigent writ is an allocatur exigent without confirming that the procedural basis was the deficient return. Additionally, the modern legal term "exigent circumstances" — prominent in Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure doctrine — is entirely unrelated in origin and application. Do not carry associations from modern constitutional usage backward into historical outlawry process.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of exclusively historical English practice. It will not appear in American common law as a live procedural tool; outlawry as a formal legal process was never adopted in American courts and was abolished in England by the early nineteenth century. Researchers encountering allocatur exigent in primary sources are almost certainly working in:
— Pre-abolition English court records (King's Bench, Common Pleas)
— English practice treatises, particularly Tidd's Practice, which is the uniform citation anchor across all source dictionaries for this term
— Historical accounts of the mechanics of outlawry procedure
The key research trap is jurisdictional contamination. The word "exigent" appears prominently in modern American criminal and constitutional law as shorthand for "exigent circumstances," the doctrine permitting warrantless police action under urgent conditions. These share no procedural lineage with the allocatur exigent. A researcher pulling sources on "exigent" without careful period and context filtering will surface an enormous volume of modern constitutional material that is simply irrelevant to historical outlawry research.
Within the Law Mind corpus, the outlawry process forms a connected web: the writ of exigent, the capias, the alias and pluries writs, and the various return doctrines all interlock. Understanding the allocatur exigent requires first having a working map of the full outlawry sequence — how many proclamations were required, what the sheriff's duties were at each county court, and what defective returns triggered secondary process.
The Tidd citation (Practice, variously cited as page 128, 132, or 138 across the source dictionaries — likely reflecting different editions) is the authoritative treatise source. Researchers should confirm edition when citing Tidd, as page references diverge slightly between editions.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in substantive agreement on the core function of this writ but contribute varying degrees of procedural specificity. Black's (both editions) offers only the baseline: a species of writ issued in outlawry proceedings on return of the original exigent. Bouvier adds the critical triggering condition — the sheriff's return showing fewer than five county courts held — which is the essential procedural fact that distinguishes allocatur exigent from the alias exigent. Burrill, characteristically, adds the most structural framing by identifying the writ as being "in the nature of an alias writ," situating it within the broader taxonomy of successive writs in English practice.
Burrill's entry is notable for a typographical or binding artifact: the definition runs into text for "Allonge," a French law term, suggesting the allocatur exigent entry was compressed at the page break. Researchers using Burrill directly should be alert to this.
None of the historical dictionaries provides meaningful treatment of the allocatur exigent's relationship to the underlying outlawry doctrine or its eventual abolition. They treat it as a static procedural artifact rather than a term with a legislative or judicial end point. Researchers needing the abolition history must look beyond dictionary sources to English statutes and secondary works on the history of civil and criminal process.
Jurisdictional Note
The allocatur exigent is a creature of English common law practice with no recognized American equivalent. American jurisdictions did not adopt outlawry as a formal procedure, and the writ has no modern domestic application. All substantive authority is English.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Note: The Law Mind Encyclopedia entries most closely matching "exigent" address modern constitutional doctrine — Warrantless Searches: Exigent Circumstances (criminal_152) and Exceptions to the Warrant Requirement (constitutional_117). These entries are not relevant to the allocatur exigent, which predates and is unrelated to Fourth Amendment doctrine. Researchers should not follow those cross-references when researching this term.