Definition
In admiralty and civil law practice, apostles are brief dismissory letters issued by a lower court to a superior court upon appeal. The letters, signed by the judge from whose decision the appeal is taken (the judge *a quo*), state the case and the sentence briefly, declare the appeal, and certify that the full record of proceedings will be transmitted to the higher court. The term originates in Roman civil law and passed through English admiralty practice before appearing — with diminishing frequency — in American admiralty courts.
The function of apostles is procedural and administrative: they serve as the formal instrument by which an inferior tribunal acknowledges an appeal, summarizes its action, and hands the matter upward. They are the admiralty analog to what common-law practice accomplishes through a writ of certiorari or a certified record on appeal.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Plural of apostle" — referring most commonly to the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ. In ordinary English, the word carries exclusively religious connotations.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The twelve disciples sent forth by Christ to preach the gospel; by extension, any early Christian missionary or founder of a church in a region.
The gap between common and legal meaning is complete. The legal term is a term of art borrowed from Greek through Roman civil law (*apostoli* — "those sent forth"), applied to documents rather than persons. A researcher encountering "apostles" in an admiralty record or civil law treatise should not read it in its religious sense; it refers to the formal letters of dismissal accompanying an appeal, not to any person or ecclesiastical matter.
Common Confusion
Apostles are sometimes loosely conflated with the full appellate record or transcript. They are not the record itself — they are the covering instrument that certifies and accompanies the record. Burrill distinguishes "short letters dismissory" (apostles proper) from the fuller transmission of all proceedings that the apostles announce and authorize. Some historical sources use the term loosely to describe the entire transmitted papers, including the underlying record; American admiralty courts occasionally adopted this broader usage.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of almost exclusively historical and specialized admiralty significance. Researchers will encounter it in:
— English admiralty court records and civilian treatises from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, where it appears as routine procedural vocabulary.
— American admiralty cases and practice manuals from the federal period onward, where the term persisted but became increasingly rare as American appellate procedure developed its own vocabulary.
— Civil law source materials, particularly digests of Roman and continental procedure, where the term appears in discussions of the appeal mechanism (*appellatio*).
The primary research trap is anachronism: the term was in active technical use in admiralty practice at periods when common-law appellate procedure used entirely different language. A researcher moving between common-law and admiralty sources from the same era will find different vocabularies describing functionally similar procedures. Apostles belong to the admiralty/civilian tradition; look for "writ of error," "certiorari," or "record on appeal" in parallel common-law sources.
A secondary trap is the incomplete Rapalje & Lawrence entry in this corpus, which appears to have been captured mid-alphabetical-sequence and does not yield a usable definition for this term. Researchers relying on Rapalje & Lawrence for this entry should cross-reference Bouvier and Burrill instead.
The term has no meaningful modern application in U.S. practice — it surfaces in research primarily when interpreting historical admiralty documents or tracing the procedural lineage of modern appellate transmission requirements.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in substantive agreement. Black's (both editions), Bouvier, and Burrill all identify apostles as dismissory letters from the lower court, accompanying an appeal, stating the case and declaring the record will follow. Burrill adds the most procedural texture, noting that apostles are distinct from a fuller transmission and that they function as formal certification of the appeal by the judge *a quo*. Bouvier usefully ties the term to Dig. 49.6 (the Digest of Justinian, Title 6 on apostles) and to Brown's *Civil and Admiralty Law*, situating the term firmly in the Roman civil law tradition.
No historical dictionary adequately traces the point at which American admiralty courts stopped using the term as active vocabulary. Black's notes only that it is "still sometimes applied" — a hedge that suggests even at the time of drafting the term was becoming archaic in American practice. The historical sources are silent on any statutory or rule-based displacement of the term.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is an artifact of admiralty jurisdiction and has no application in state court practice. In federal admiralty courts, it appeared in the early national period as inherited English admiralty vocabulary but was gradually displaced by the procedural rules governing admiralty appeals. It is not a term a researcher will encounter in modern Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure or Supplemental Admiralty Rules.