Definition
In civil and canon law, an attentat is any act wrongfully innovated or attempted in a suit by an inferior judge — the judge a quo — while an appeal is pending. The term captures procedural usurpation: the lower court doing something it has no authority to do once the cause has been removed to a higher tribunal. The appeal suspends the inferior court's jurisdiction, and any action taken in defiance of that suspension constitutes an attentat.
The concept was operative primarily in ecclesiastical and civil law proceedings where hierarchical appellate structures were well-developed and the suspension effect of an appeal was formally recognized. An attentat was not a separate cause of action but a characterization of irregular judicial conduct — conduct subject to correction or reversal by the appellate court.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In general English, attentat has an unrelated modern sense: an attempted assassination or politically motivated assault, particularly in the context of European political history. This usage has no legal significance in Anglo-American law.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a separate entry for attentat, which reflects the term's status as specialist legal vocabulary with little purchase in ordinary English during that period.
Editorial note: The political assassination sense — prominent in historical accounts of European affairs — has no connection to the civil and canon law meaning. A researcher encountering attentat in a 19th-century English ecclesiastical law source and a 20th-century account of Balkan politics is reading two entirely different words that happen to share a form. The legal sense is narrow, procedural, and jurisdiction-specific.
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Common Confusion
ATTENTAT vs. ATTEMPT: Burrill flags the Latin root attentare, and Rapalje & Lawrence place the entries adjacent, which can create confusion. In Anglo-American criminal law, attempt refers to an incomplete offense — an act beyond preparation done with intent to commit a crime. Attentat, by contrast, is not a criminal law term and does not describe incomplete offenses. It describes irregular judicial action during a pending appeal. The two terms share a Latin ancestor but operate in entirely different doctrinal spaces.
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Why It Matters in Research
Attentat is a term that surfaces almost exclusively in English ecclesiastical court reports and treatises on canon and civil procedure — most concentrated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when English ecclesiastical jurisdiction was still active and Doctors' Commons still functioned. Researchers working in that corpus will encounter it in appeals from consistory courts and in treatises like Ayliffe's Parergon Juris Canonici Anglicani and Shelford's work on marriage and divorce. Outside that literature, the term is essentially dormant in Anglo-American legal sources.
The practical research trap is the modern non-legal sense. Digitized corpus searches on attentat will return large volumes of material on political assassinations — particularly post-1900 European history — with no relevance to legal proceedings. Filtering by source type and date range is necessary to isolate the legal usage.
A second trap: because the term appears in Latin form in many sources, researchers may encounter it without translation in footnotes or headnotes. It does not denote a type of crime, a form of pleading, or a substantive doctrine — it denotes a specific procedural wrong committed by a lower court. Understanding that framing is essential to reading the cases correctly.
Jurisdictionally, attentat has no direct analogue in American federal or state procedural law, though the underlying principle — that a lower court loses jurisdiction over a matter once it is on appeal — is of course preserved. Researchers moving from ecclesiastical law sources into American equity practice should not expect to find the term, but may find the concept embedded in discussions of supersedeas and the automatic stay.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The five historical dictionaries are in close agreement, which is itself informative: this is a term with a settled, narrow meaning that generated no significant doctrinal controversy. All five converge on the same essential definition — wrongful innovation or attempt by the inferior judge pending appeal — with Black's 2nd edition and Burrill adding the clarifying phrase "judge a quo," which is the technically precise designation for the court from which the appeal runs.
Bouvier adds the citation to 1 Addams' Ecclesiastical Reports and Ayliffe's Parergon, pointing researchers directly to the English ecclesiastical law context where the term was operative. Burrill further adds Shelford's Marriage and Divorce, situating the term within that specific litigation context — not surprising, given that matrimonial causes were among the most actively appealed matters in ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the extent to which English common law courts recognized or gave effect to attentat doctrine. The silence is telling. This was a term of the civilian tradition, operative in courts governed by canon and civil law, and largely invisible to common law practitioners of the same era. Its absence from common law treatises and its presence only in ecclesiastical law sources confirms the narrow domain.
None of the five dictionaries acknowledges the political assassination sense at all, which was presumably not yet established in English legal vocabulary at the time of publication.
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Jurisdictional Note
Attentat as a formal legal concept belongs to the English ecclesiastical court system and the broader civilian tradition from which it drew. It has no established place in American law and does not appear as a recognized term in American federal or state procedural codes. Researchers working in Scottish, South African, or continental European legal sources applying civil law traditions may encounter the term in its original civilian sense.
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