Definition
A case reserved is a procedural device by which unresolved questions of law arising during a trial are set aside for later determination by a higher or fuller court, rather than decided on the spot. After the trial concludes, the attorneys for both sides, working under the direction of the presiding judge, prepare a written statement setting out the facts proved at trial. That document — the case reserved — is then submitted to the court sitting in banc (the full bench) for deliberate argument and decision on the legal points that could not be satisfactorily resolved during the trial itself.
The term is also used as a synonym for "special case" — a closely related procedure in which agreed or stipulated facts are submitted to a court for a ruling on a pure question of law, without a full trial having occurred. The two devices overlap and historical sources sometimes use the terms interchangeably.
Common Confusion
Case reserved and special case are treated as synonyms in Black's and in many older English authorities. In practice, however, there is a working distinction worth noting: a case reserved typically arises after trial, capturing legal questions that emerged from actual contested proceedings; a special case is more often a pre-arranged submission of agreed facts to obtain a legal ruling. Researchers should not assume the terms are always interchangeable when reading nineteenth-century English reports or American equity practice materials, as courts occasionally used them with distinct procedural implications.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a creature of English common law procedure and its American inheritors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers working in pre-codification American case law — particularly before the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and the later adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — will encounter case reserved regularly. After procedural modernization, the device was largely absorbed into statutory appeal mechanisms and certified question procedures, so the term largely disappears from twentieth-century American materials.
Key navigational points:
First, the case reserved was not an appeal in the modern sense. No appellate court in the contemporary meaning reviewed a lower court's judgment. Instead, the same court, or the court in banc, reconsidered a question left open. Researchers should not conflate case reserved with writ of error or appeal when indexing or tracing procedural history.
Second, the term survives in some Commonwealth jurisdictions — particularly English, Canadian, and Australian materials — longer than in American sources. English criminal practice retained a version of the procedure (the "case stated" or "case reserved for the opinion of the court") well into the twentieth century. Cross-jurisdictional research must account for this survival.
Third, because the case reserved required counsel to draft an agreed statement of facts, the resulting document can be an unusually clean record of what the parties understood the evidence to establish. For legal historians, these documents are valuable primary sources separate from the legal ruling they generated.
Fourth, researchers should check whether their jurisdiction's historical practice distinguished between civil and criminal uses. In criminal matters, case reserved was used to obtain rulings on questions of law after verdict without disturbing the verdict itself — a function closer to a post-verdict motion in arrest of judgment than to modern criminal appeal.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the core definition and identifies the procedure accurately: a written statement of proved facts, settled by counsel under judicial supervision, submitted for full-bench argument on legal questions that could not be satisfactorily decided at trial. Black's also confirms the synonym relationship with "special case."
Historical sources are consistent on the mechanics but less clear on the precise procedural boundaries between case reserved, special case, case stated, and demurrer to evidence — all of which occupied overlapping terrain in pre-reform procedure. Researchers should treat these as a family of related devices rather than strictly distinct categories when reading nineteenth-century authorities. The historical dictionaries do not adequately flag the disappearance of the term from American practice after procedural codification, which is the most important gap for modern researchers to understand.
Jurisdictional Note
The case reserved is largely obsolete in American federal and most state practice, replaced by certified questions, interlocutory appeals, and post-trial motions. It remains relevant in historical American research through roughly the mid-nineteenth century. In England, Australia, and Canada, variants of the procedure persisted under names including "case stated" and "stated case" and may appear in Commonwealth materials well into the twentieth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No single Law Mind Encyclopedia entry covers case reserved directly. The closest relevant context is appellate and trial court procedure. For background on reserved rights and reservation concepts in other legal contexts, see: Easements — Creation by Express Grant or Reservation (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia) and The Tenth Amendment — Reserved Powers and State Sovereignty (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia) — though neither addresses this procedural device.