Definition
A term from Law French meaning advice or opinion, used in historical legal texts to denote the considered judgment or recommendation of a court, counsel, or advisory body. The term appears most commonly in medieval and early modern legal writing as a shorthand for a formal expression of legal opinion, particularly in contexts where a court or judge indicated that a matter was taken under advisement or that a ruling was grounded in deliberate consideration.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering AVIZ in historical sources — particularly Year Books, early English court records, or treatises drawing on the Law French tradition — should treat it as a signal that the passage concerns the deliberative or advisory function of a legal actor rather than a final, binding command. The term belongs to a cluster of Law French advisory vocabulary (alongside AVIS and related forms) that appears inconsistently spelled across manuscript sources, meaning keyword searches in digitized corpora will miss variants. Researchers should search for both AVIZ and AVIS when working in pre-1700 English legal materials.
The practical danger is conflating AVIZ with terms of final determination. Where a court record uses AVIZ, the matter may still be open — it signals that an opinion has been offered or that a court has taken a question under consideration, not necessarily that a judgment has issued. This distinction matters when tracing procedural history in early common law materials.
The term has no meaningful modern legal life. It does not appear in current American, English, or Commonwealth legal usage. Any appearance in a modern document is either an archaism, a direct quotation from a historical source, or a term of art in a specialized comparative or civil law context outside the common law tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary common law source confirming this term, and its treatment is spare: "L. Fr. Advice; opinion. Kelham." The reference to Kelham points to Robert Kelham's Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language (1779), one of the standard authorities on Law French vocabulary. Burrill's brevity here reflects the term's narrow utility — it is a vocabulary item rather than a legal concept with doctrinal weight.
No substantial divergence exists among historical sources on the core meaning. The term is functionally synonymous with the English "advice" in its older legal sense of formal, considered opinion. What historical dictionaries do not supply is any contextual guidance on how to distinguish AVIZ from terms of final determination in the sources where it appears — a gap researchers must fill through close reading of surrounding procedural language.
Jurisdictional Note
AVIZ is a historical term of the common law's Law French inheritance and is not in active use in any modern jurisdiction. It appears only in historical English legal materials and in scholarship treating that tradition.