Definition
A writ of prohibition, now wholly obsolete, directed against officers of a court to prevent them from exacting fines from litigants for the manner in which they pleaded their cases. The writ addressed the practice of court officers levying charges — sometimes called fines for fair pleading or beau pleader — upon parties who were compelled to pay simply for the privilege of pleading, or as a penalty for defective pleading form. By issuing the writ, a superior authority could restrain this exaction as unlawful.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal sources, primarily registers of writs and early treatises on common law procedure. Researchers encountering it in historical pleading records, Year Books, or registers of original writs should understand that it belongs to a cluster of obsolete supervisory writs concerned with regulating the conduct of inferior court officers — distinct from writs addressing the substance of litigation.
The principal research trap is the fragmented nature of the source record. The term appears without extended definition even in comprehensive historical dictionaries; Black's both first and second editions dispose of it in a single sentence, and Bouvier offers little more. This thinness reflects the writ's early disuse rather than any ambiguity about its function. Researchers should not expect to find case law or statutory elaboration: the writ vanished from active use long before systematic law reporting.
A secondary trap arises from the proximity of related writs and fines. CHRE PLACITANDO overlaps terminologically with the fine for beau pleader (DE FINE PRO BELLO PLACITO) and must be distinguished from writs touching the substance of fines levied in final judgments. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry indexed under the related term DE FINE NON CAPIENDO, ETC. provides the most useful neighboring material in the historical dictionary corpus, though it addresses fines in a different procedural context entirely.
Researchers tracing the history of court officer accountability or the regulation of court fees in early English practice will find this writ relevant as one of several mechanisms by which higher courts policed the fee-extracting conduct of inferior officers — a function that eventually passed into statutory and supervisory judicial control.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries converge on the writ's basic function but offer almost no analytical depth. Black's first edition characterizes it as "an obsolete writ" without further elaboration, cross-referencing instead to FINE PRO REDISSEISIN. The second edition of Black's is marginally more informative, citing Reg. Orig. 179 (the Registrum Omnium Brevium, the standard early modern register of original writs) and clarifying that the writ prohibited taking "fines for beau pleader" — using the French law term that signals the writ's roots in Anglo-Norman pleading practice.
Bouvier tracks the same substance in plain language: the writ prohibited "officers of court from taking fines for fair pleading." No historical dictionary in the corpus provides a form of the writ, a procedural account of how it was obtained, or examples of its use in practice.
What the historical sources collectively miss is any account of the writ's lifespan, the specific abuses that generated it, or how the underlying problem — improper exaction of pleading fees — came to be addressed by other means after the writ fell into disuse. The Rapalje & Lawrence excerpt indexed here addresses fines in the context of FINE SUR CONUSANCE DE DROIT, a conveyancing device entirely separate from CHRE PLACITANDO; its appearance in the source material likely reflects an indexing proximity rather than a substantive connection to this writ.
Jurisdictional Note
CHRE PLACITANDO was an instrument of English common law and has no counterpart in American legal practice. It never took root in colonial or post-independence American courts, which addressed court officer misconduct through different procedural and statutory channels.