Definition
A certificate for costs is a written memorandum issued by a judge or presiding officer at the conclusion of a trial, attesting to certain facts required by statute or court rule before a prevailing party may recover costs from the opposing party. The certificate functions as a threshold document: without it, the right to costs does not attach, regardless of outcome on the merits.
In English practice — where the concept was most fully developed — specific categories of cases required a judge's certificate to establish facts such as the amount in controversy, the nature of the cause of action, or the court in which the matter was properly brought. These facts were not reviewable on the face of the pleadings alone and had to be certified from the trial judge's personal knowledge of the proceeding. The certificate did not itself award costs; it established the predicate facts that triggered a statutory entitlement to them.
Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a term of English practice. Researchers encountering it in American sources before the mid-nineteenth century are almost certainly reading about English procedure either directly or through treatise writers like Tidd, Chitty, and Stephen — the same authorities Burrill cites. After the procedural reforms of the Judicature Acts (1873–75) and, later, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States (1938), the formal certificate mechanism largely disappeared as a distinct procedural step. American courts absorbed cost-fixing functions into the clerk's taxation process and judicial discretion under general cost statutes.
The practical research trap: a researcher working through nineteenth-century American equity or common law records who encounters a reference to a "certificate for costs" should not assume a direct American statutory analog. The term likely signals either a direct citation to English authority or a local court rule borrowing English terminology without identical content.
Researchers using this term as a search anchor in the Law Mind corpus should cross-reference Rule 54(d) materials and 28 U.S.C. § 1920 taxonomy in civpro_142 to map what the modern American system substituted for the certificate mechanism. The functional successor — the bill of costs reviewed by the clerk and subject to judicial review — is procedurally distinct but serves overlapping purposes.
Note also that "certificate" appears throughout legal sources in unrelated contexts (certificate of title, certificate of deposit, death certificate). In cost-related research, precision of phrase matters; "certificate for costs" is a term of art, not merely any document touching on costs.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries are in substantive agreement: both describe a judge-signed document certifying facts necessary to establish entitlement to costs. Burrill's entry is the richer of the two, citing Tidd's Practice, Stephen's Commentaries, Wooddeson's Lectures, and Chitty's General Practice — the standard English procedural reference shelf of the early nineteenth century. Black's entry adds the useful gloss that entitlement to costs flows "under the statutes," correctly locating the certificate's function as a statutory trigger rather than a common law right.
Neither dictionary flags the historical obsolescence of the mechanism or notes its absence from American federal practice. Both entries reflect the state of English procedure as it existed before the Judicature Act reforms. Researchers relying solely on these entries will not appreciate that the term was already becoming archaic at the time Black's first edition was compiled (1891) and has no direct operational equivalent in contemporary American courts.
Burrill's citation to 1 Tidd's Pr. 792, 952 is the most useful pointer for researchers who need primary authority on the English practice. Tidd's Practice was the leading English procedural treatise of the period and treats the certificate requirement in the context of the rules governing recovery of costs in the various common law courts.
Jurisdictional Note
The certificate for costs is a term of English common law practice with no direct statutory equivalent in modern American federal or state procedure. Some nineteenth-century American states incorporated analogous certificate requirements into local cost statutes, but these varied widely and have largely been superseded. Researchers working in English legal history or pre-reform common law jurisdictions will find the term operative; those working in contemporary American practice should look instead to Rule 54(d) and applicable local rules.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
civpro_142: Costs and Taxation of Costs — Rule 54(d) and 28 USC 1920 (The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia)