CAV

Definition

CAV is a Latin abbreviation appearing in court records and legal reporting, most commonly standing for one of the following: 1. Curia advisari vult — "the court wishes to be advised" or "the court will consider the matter." This is the primary legal sense. When a court noted "CAV" or wrote out the phrase, it indicated that the judges were reserving judgment rather than deciding from the bench. The case was taken under advisement, with a written decision to follow. 2. In some older records and digest systems, CAV appears as a shortened reference to caveat-related entries or proceedings, reflecting the proximity of the abbreviation to caveat practice in historical indexes and dictionaries. The first meaning is by far the dominant legal usage and the one a researcher is most likely to encounter in reported cases and court records.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Clipping of "cavalry" — a military or mounted force. Historical common usage (Webster's 1813): Not separately listed; understood as an informal shortening of cavalry in military and colloquial contexts. The gap matters because a researcher encountering "CAV" in a legal manuscript, law report, or digest entry will find no connection whatsoever to the military meaning. In legal sources, CAV is procedural shorthand, not a military reference.

Common Confusion

CAV (curia advisari vult) is sometimes confused with the related notation cur. adv. vult, which is simply the fuller abbreviation of the same Latin phrase. Both mean the court has taken the matter under advisement. Researchers should treat them as equivalent. CAV should not be confused with CAVEAT, which is a distinct substantive legal concept — a formal notice or warning — despite the superficial similarity in appearance and the proximity of caveat-related entries in older dictionaries like Burrill's.

Why It Matters in Research

Researchers working in English and early American law reports will encounter CAV or cur. adv. vult with some regularity in the procedural headers and body text of cases from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its presence signals that no bench ruling was delivered; the decision was reserved and issued later, often as a written opinion. This matters for two reasons. First, when tracing the history of a doctrine, finding CAV in the record tells you the case was considered significant or difficult enough for the court to deliberate — a useful signal when assessing doctrinal weight. Second, the notation occasionally causes confusion in older digest and index systems where caveat-related entries appear in the same alphabetical cluster. Burrill's Law Dictionary, for instance, places material about cautio (security or bail in Roman and Scots law) and caveat practice in close proximity to abbreviation entries, which can mislead a researcher into conflating the terms. The excerpt in Burrill's referencing "caution" and "satisdatio" alongside caveator and caveatee reflects this organizational adjacency, not a definitional connection to CAV as a court abbreviation. In American state court records from the colonial and early national periods, CAV appears less frequently than in English reports but is not absent, particularly in courts with strong English common law procedural traditions such as Virginia and South Carolina.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill's Law Dictionary does not provide a direct entry for CAV as a standalone abbreviation for curia advisari vult. The relevant excerpt in Burrill addresses cautio and caveat practice, with the abbreviation appearing incidentally in context rather than as the defined term. This is a meaningful gap: researchers relying solely on Burrill for the meaning of CAV in a case header would be misled into caveat or surety-law territory rather than the procedural reservation-of-judgment sense that the abbreviation almost certainly carries in that context. Older English law dictionaries and abridgments — Tomlin's Law Dictionary and Wharton's Law Lexicon, for instance — treat cur. adv. vult more fully as a procedural term. The convergence across those sources confirms that curia advisari vult was a well-established and broadly understood notation in English common law courts, even where specific dictionary treatment of the abbreviated form "CAV" is thin.

Jurisdictional Note

Curia advisari vult and its abbreviations are primarily features of English common law court practice and those American courts that adopted English procedural forms directly. The notation is rare in civil law jurisdictions and in modern American federal practice, where opinions are typically labeled differently. Researchers in Louisiana or Quebec materials should not expect to encounter it.

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