Definition
An obsolete practice at the English Inns of Court — most closely associated with Gray's Inn — in which law students argued cases privately and informally among themselves. Bolting was distinguished from mooting, the more formal, public, and ceremonial method of legal argument that took place before benchers or senior members. Both practices were educational exercises designed to train students in legal reasoning and oral argument, but bolting occupied the less regulated, more conversational end of the spectrum.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Present participle and gerund of "bolt" — as in running away suddenly, or fastening something shut.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A darting away; a starting off or aside."
The gap here is complete. The common meaning of "bolting" — sudden escape or rapid departure — shares no conceptual ground with its legal meaning. A researcher encountering "bolting" in historical Inns of Court records or legal education texts would have no intuitive basis for connecting the word to private case argument. Context is the only guide.
Why It Matters in Research
Bolting is a term that lives almost entirely in historical sources and will surface primarily in materials concerning legal education, the Inns of Court, and the development of the English legal profession before the formal law school era. Researchers working in those areas should be alert to two things.
First, the distinction between bolting and mooting matters when tracing the evolution of legal pedagogy. Mooting has survived as a recognized practice (and term) into modern legal education; bolting has not. Sources that treat them as interchangeable are imprecise. The distinction — private and informal versus public and ceremonial — reflects a genuine structural difference in how legal training operated at the Inns.
Second, the term appears in a cluster of older secondary authorities (Cowell, Tomlins, Holthouse) that are themselves research objects rather than working tools. When Black's and Burrill's cite these sources, they are transmitting a description of a defunct practice rather than defining operative law. This entry, and any historical source repeating it, is descriptive and antiquarian in character — not a foundation for legal argument.
No modern jurisdictional variation exists because the practice is obsolete and was never transplanted to American legal institutions.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three dictionary sources — Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill's — are in complete agreement, tracking nearly identical language drawn from the same chain of English legal antiquaries: Cowell, Tomlins, and Holthouse. This unanimity reflects the term's narrow scope: there is essentially one thing to say about bolting, and all three sources say it.
Burrill's entry adds a note on etymology — deriving "bolt" from the Saxon word for "house" — suggesting the practice may have been named for its domestic or indoor, private character, as opposed to the more public hall-based proceedings of mooting. This etymological gloss is absent from both editions of Black's. Whether the Saxon derivation is sound is a matter for philologists; for legal research purposes, it adds texture but not operative meaning.
None of the three sources provide dates for when bolting fell out of use, nor do they describe its procedural mechanics in detail — how many participants, what subject matter, whether any record was kept. Researchers seeking that level of institutional history will need to look beyond the standard law dictionaries to histories of the Inns of Court specifically.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Inns of Court; Legal Education (Historical); Mooting