Definition
An obsolete Latin-derived term for arraignment — the formal court proceeding at which a criminal defendant is called before the court, informed of the charges against them, and required to enter a plea. The term appears in older legal texts as a synonym for arraignment and carries no independent legal meaning beyond that equivalence. It is encountered almost exclusively in historical sources and has no currency in modern practice.
Common Confusion
ASTITUTION / ARRAIGNMENT: These terms are not confused so much as one has wholly displaced the other. Astitution should be understood as a former name for arraignment, not as a separate or overlapping concept. A reader encountering astitution in a historical source can substitute arraignment without any loss of meaning. See ARRAIGNMENT for the full substantive treatment of the procedure.
Why It Matters in Research
Astitution is a term a researcher will encounter only in pre-modern legal texts, particularly those citing or paraphrasing Coke. It functions as a terminological artifact: recognizing it as a synonym for arraignment is the practical research task, not understanding any independent doctrine attached to the word itself. When searching historical sources — Year Books, early common law treatises, or materials citing Coke on Littleton — astitution may appear where a modern text would simply say arraignment. Failing to recognize the equivalence could cause a researcher to miss directly relevant doctrine. The term is not indexed in most modern legal research platforms, so corpus searches using arraignment as the primary term will capture the substantive law; astitution is useful only as a recognition flag, not a productive search term in its own right.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on a single, narrow point: astitution is an archaic name for arraignment. Burrill provides the most useful context, tracing the Latin roots (ad + statuere — to place or set in order, one by another) and citing Coke on Littleton 262b as the authority for the usage. This grounding in Coke explains why the term surfaces in seventeenth-century legal writing and in sources that draw on that tradition. Black's (both first and second editions) treats the term with dispatch, defining it simply as arraignment and directing the reader elsewhere — a signal that even the leading historical dictionaries regarded it as a cross-reference term rather than a substantive entry. None of the source dictionaries assign astitution any distinct legal content beyond its synonym status, and no authority treats it as carrying procedural meaning different from arraignment. The historical record is consistent and thin: the word existed, it meant arraignment, and it fell out of use.