Definition
A Latin term meaning "it was granted" or "it was conceded." In the old English law reports, concessum signals that the court — or the whole court — assented to a legal proposition, doctrine, or point of argument raised by counsel. It is a term of judicial acknowledgment, not a formal ruling: the court is recorded as having accepted a position without necessarily deciding a contested issue on the merits.
The closely related noun form, concessus, refers to the grantee — the party to whom something is granted. This usage appears in conveyancing and property contexts and should be distinguished from the verbal/adverbial form concessum that dominates the old reports.
Common Confusion
Concessum is not equivalent to a holding, judgment, or precedent. When an old report records concessum or quod fuit concessum per totam curiam ("which was granted by the whole court"), it means the bench accepted a proposition during argument — not that the court issued a ruling enforceable as binding authority. Researchers treating concessum passages as statements of decided law risk misreading the persuasive weight of those sources. Similarly, concessum should not be confused with per curiam, which denotes an opinion issued by the court as a whole, or with dictum, which is an observation not essential to the decision. Concessum occupies its own category: judicial concession during argument.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a reading tool for the old English reports — Year Books, early nominate reporters, and Coke's Reports in particular. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus who encounter concessum (or its abbreviation conc.) in pre-nineteenth century English sources need to recognize it immediately as a procedural notation rather than substantive law.
Several traps exist. First, concessum passages can look like holdings when read out of context. A proposition followed by "quod fuit concessum" carries real weight as evidence of what the bar and bench accepted as settled doctrine, but it is not a judgment and cannot be cited as one. Second, the term disappears almost entirely from reports after law reporting professionalized in the nineteenth century; searching for it in post-1850 sources will return little. Third, American sources rarely use concessum at all — it is a feature of English common law reporting conventions, and its absence from American reports reflects both the shift in reporting style and the general pruning of Latinisms from U.S. practice. Researchers following a doctrinal thread from English to American sources must translate this notation into the equivalent American procedural language.
The noun form concessus surfaces in older conveyancing materials and grants, sometimes in the same sources, requiring contextual disambiguation.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on core meaning with only minor variation in framing.
Burrill provides the most detailed treatment and the most useful illustration: "Quod fuit concessum per totam curiam; which was granted by the whole court." Burrill also preserves Lord Coke's observation that Littleton's "an il est dit" (it is said) carries the same weight as a concessum — a useful comparative note showing that contemporaries treated the term as a recognized marker of judicial assent rather than a casual aside. This cross-reference to Littleton is absent from the other dictionaries and is the most instructive passage in the historical record on this term.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds the noun form concessus (grantee) and the entry for concilium, which the editors treat as a related but separate term, suggesting that compilers of the period saw these Latin procedural terms as a connected family of report notation.
Black's (both editions) keeps the definition terse — "accorded; conceded" — and notes only the old-reports usage. Neither edition adds to what Burrill provides. What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any guidance on distinguishing concessum from holding or dictum, a gap that matters considerably for a modern researcher trying to assess the authority of a passage.
Jurisdictional Note
Concessum is essentially an English legal term. American courts and reports did not adopt it as a reporting convention. Researchers in American primary sources will not encounter it except in direct quotation from English authorities or in scholarly commentary on old English reports.