Definition
A Latin procedural term meaning "of the bystanders" or "from those standing around." It refers to the persons physically present in a courtroom who could be called upon to complete a jury panel when the regular jury pool (venire) was insufficient in number. The term is most closely associated with the writ or court direction issued to the sheriff — sometimes called a tales de circumstantibus — ordering him to summon bystanders from within the courthouse to fill vacant juror positions. The resulting jurors so empaneled were known as talesmen.
Common Confusion
CIRCUMSTANTIBUS and TALES are closely linked and often used interchangeably in historical sources, but they are not identical. Tales is the broader doctrine and writ process by which additional jurors are summoned to supplement a deficient panel; circumstantibus specifically identifies the source of those additional jurors — namely, persons already present in court rather than summoned from the community at large. Bouvier effectively collapses the two by redirecting readers to TALES, which can obscure the distinction for researchers working with older procedural records.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical sources tied to common law jury procedure. Researchers encountering it in pre-twentieth-century court records, pleading manuals, or treatises should understand it as a procedural mechanism — not a substantive legal concept — that governed jury assembly when venire panels came up short. Several practical traps exist:
First, the term rarely appears outside its procedural context. If you encounter it in a document, you are almost certainly looking at a record of jury formation, a writ directed to a sheriff, or a commentary on trial procedure rather than any substantive area of law.
Second, the distinction between summoning talesmen from circumstantibus (bystanders already present) versus summoning them from the broader community reflects a meaningful procedural difference in historical practice. Courts in more sparsely populated jurisdictions or during lengthy terms might exhaust bystanders and require a different process. The nuance matters when reading sheriff's returns or jury impanelment records.
Third, the term has no meaningful modern application. Contemporary jury selection procedure in both federal and state courts operates under statutes and rules governing jury wheels, master lists, and supplemental summoning — the ad hoc bystander draft has been abolished. Any modern appearance of this term is either historical quotation, arcane local procedure, or error.
Fourth, because Bouvier simply cross-references TALES without defining circumstantibus independently, researchers using Bouvier as a primary dictionary source will miss the specific bystander-summoning context. Black's brief entry, citing Blackstone, is the more useful starting point, but neither source fully explains the procedural mechanics. Researchers needing depth should go directly to Blackstone's Commentaries, Book III.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines the term concisely as "so many of the by-standers" and identifies it as the emphatic operative words of the old writ directed to the sheriff, citing Blackstone's Commentaries at Book III, page 365. This is a reliable and accurate entry; the Blackstone citation is genuine and accessible.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers no independent definition, redirecting entirely to TALES. This is the more significant entry for corpus researchers to understand: Bouvier's choice to absorb circumstantibus into the tales entry reflects how nineteenth-century practitioners thought about the two concepts as functionally unified. But the cross-reference approach means Bouvier provides no linguistic or procedural analysis of the Latin phrase itself.
Neither dictionary addresses the evolution or eventual abolition of the practice, nor do they distinguish between jurisdictions that adopted the tales de circumstantibus mechanism by statute versus those that retained it as common law procedure. Researchers should treat both entries as confirmatory of the term's meaning but not as comprehensive accounts of its procedural history.
Jurisdictional Note
The tales de circumstantibus procedure was received into American common law from English practice and was at various points codified by statute in a number of states. Application and availability varied by jurisdiction, and some American courts imposed restrictions on how many bystanders could be drafted. The procedure is now uniformly superseded by modern jury selection statutes.