Definition
A writ in English legal practice by which a matter previously determined by assise before justices could be re-examined or retried. The writ functioned as a mechanism for reviewing the outcome of an assise proceeding — a form of early common law jury or inquest — where a party sought to challenge the result on the ground that it had been improperly decided. The certification of assise is entirely obsolete, having been superseded by the modern remedy of a new trial.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not conflate certification of assise with the writ of attaint, which was the specific common law mechanism for challenging a jury verdict as false. Certification of assise addressed the result of an assise proceeding more broadly; attaint was a distinct and more adversarial remedy targeting the jurors themselves. Similarly, the writ of error — which brought a case before a higher court on questions of law appearing on the record — served a different function and operated in a different procedural register. The modern new trial motion has effectively absorbed the functional purpose of all three mechanisms in contemporary practice.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English legal sources and is of no operative significance in any modern jurisdiction. Researchers encountering the phrase in pre-modern English records, Year Books, or early treatises should understand it as a precursor to the new trial motion rather than as a form of appellate review in the modern sense. The mechanism was tied specifically to the assise system — a distinct procedural institution that itself became vestigial — and should not be read as a general writ of error or certiorari.
The key navigational trap is conflation with related but distinct writs. Certification of assise is not the same as attaint (which challenged a jury's false verdict), nor is it identical to writ of error (which challenged errors of law on the record). It operated within the narrow context of matters resolved by assise and was not a general review mechanism. Researchers working in early English legal history or the development of appellate procedure will find this term useful as a data point in tracing how the common law evolved from specialized writs toward the generalized new trial.
Because both editions of Black's define the term identically and briefly, there is little internal development to track across those sources. The corpus value here is primarily taxonomic: locating where this writ fits within the broader landscape of early English procedural remedies.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary offer identical, terse definitions: a writ anciently granted for the re-examining or retrial of a matter passed by assise before justices, described as entirely superseded by the new trial. The agreement across editions is unsurprising given the term's purely historical character — there was no living practice to evolve or dispute. Neither edition provides procedural detail about how the writ was initiated, what grounds sufficed, or how it related to other review mechanisms of its era. This is a limitation researchers should note: Black's preserves the label and its basic function but does not furnish the institutional context necessary to understand how the writ actually operated in practice. For that depth, sources such as Blackstone's Commentaries, Bracton, or Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium would be more informative starting points.
The reference in Black's (1st Ed.) to certificats de coûtume immediately following the entry for certification of assise is a formatting artifact of the original dictionary's alphabetical arrangement and carries no substantive connection to this term.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses the certification of assise or the assise system as a procedural institution. The matching entries proposed (intellectual property certification marks, teacher certification, hospital conditions of participation) share only the word "certification" and are not relevant to this term. Omitted.