Definition
A Latin maxim meaning "the others being silent." Used in early English case reports to indicate that the other judges present offered no opinion — neither concurring nor dissenting — leaving the reported judge's statement or ruling to stand without recorded endorsement or opposition from the bench.
The phrase functions as a notational device rather than a term of substantive law. Its presence in an old report signals that only one judge spoke to the point being reported, and the reader should not infer that the silent judges agreed with the position stated.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English reports — Year Books, early nominative reporters, and similar sources — will encounter this phrase as a qualifier attached to judicial statements. Its significance is interpretive: a passage marked caeteris tacentibus carries less precedential weight than one reflecting a full bench's expressed agreement. Where the phrase appears, the reported statement may represent only a single judge's view, even if no dissent is recorded.
The trap for the unwary researcher is treating silence as assent. In the context of old reports, silence was not agreement — it was simply non-participation in the recorded dialogue. A statement offered caeteris tacentibus cannot safely be read as the holding of the court as a whole.
This matters when tracing the lineage of a common law rule. If an early authority for a proposition rests on a caeteris tacentibus passage, that foundation is thinner than it might first appear. Later courts and treatise writers who cited those passages sometimes did so without flagging the qualifier, meaning downstream authority may overstate the original consensus.
The phrase is largely absent from modern legal practice and writing. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in the historical common law corpus — English reports through roughly the eighteenth century and secondary sources commenting on those reports.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier is the primary historical dictionary source for this term, and his treatment is brief: "the others being silent; the other judges expressing no opinion. A phrase in the old reports." He cites Burrill's Law Dictionary and Comberbach's Reports at page 186. This is consistent with the phrase's character as a reporter's notation rather than a doctrine. There is no substantive legal rule attached to it — only a procedural signal about the state of the bench at the time of the reported statement.
Historical dictionaries do not disagree on the meaning, largely because there is so little to disagree about. The phrase is narrow, consistent, and stable across sources. What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any guidance on how to weight a caeteris tacentibus passage when assessing precedent — that evaluative question is left entirely to the researcher.
Bouvier's cross-reference to CÆTERORUM (directing the reader to the ADMINISTRATION entry) is unrelated to this phrase; the two terms share only a Latin root.