Definition
A Latin term used in medieval English legal practice meaning "to consider," "to deliberate," "to adjudge," or "to render judgment." The term appears in old Latin legal instruments and court records as the operative verb signifying that a court, having deliberated, was formally pronouncing its judgment. It carries the combined sense of considered deliberation followed by authoritative declaration — not mere opinion, but a formal judicial act.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No direct English entry; the root concept "consider" means to think carefully about something before making a decision.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Consider" — to think on with care; to ponder; to study; to take into view or account.
The gap between the common and legal meanings is significant. In ordinary usage, "consider" describes an internal cognitive process with no binding result. In medieval legal Latin, considerare was the technical term of art for a court's act of giving judgment — a public, formal, and legally operative pronouncement. The deliberative element was implied, but the term's legal force lay in the declaration that followed, not in the thinking itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English court records, plea rolls, or year books will encounter considerare and its conjugated forms as the standard verb of judgment. Its appearance signals the operative moment of adjudication — the point at which the court's deliberation crystallized into a binding legal result.
Two navigational points are critical. First, considerare should not be read as passive deliberation. In context, it functions as the performative core of judgment — equivalent to "adjudged" or "ordered" in modern drafting. Second, the term is closely bound to the companion phrase consideratum est ("it is considered," "it is adjudged"), which is the formal past-tense record form. Researchers who locate considerare in a procedural passage are likely one step from a consideratum est formula in the judgment entry itself.
The phrase considerabitur pro querente ("judgment shall be given for the plaintiff"), cited in Fleta, illustrates the future-tense predictive use — courts or commentators anticipating the outcome of a matter still under deliberation. This use differs subtly from the retrospective record formula and matters when dating the moment of judgment in a historical proceeding.
Researchers in the Burrill corpus should cross-reference consideratum est immediately. Burrill's entry for considerare is a gateway entry; the substantive doctrinal content and fuller examples appear under the companion term. The phrase consideratio curiæ ("the consideration of the court") is the nominalized form and appears frequently in doctrinal commentary describing the judgment as an act of institutional reason, not merely the judge's personal view.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential entry. Burrill correctly identifies the core meanings — to consider, to declare as the result of deliberation, to adjudge, to give judgment — and grounds the term in old English law practice. The citation to Fleta (lib. 2, c. 53, § 2) for considerabitur pro querente is a genuine reference to the thirteenth-century English legal treatise, and researchers may consult that source directly for original context.
Burrill's treatment usefully distinguishes the bare verb considerare from its nominalized derivative consideratio curiæ, noting that the latter phrase, meaning "the consideration of the court," was commonly used in the old books to describe the judgment itself as an act implying deliberation and study. This framing is historically sound and reflects the medieval understanding that a judgment was not a bare command but the output of institutional reason.
What Burrill does not fully develop is the formulaic rigidity of the term in actual plea roll practice. Researchers who move from the dictionary entry to original records will find that considerare and consideratum est appear in highly standardized positions within judgment entries, and that their placement and verb form carry procedural information beyond their bare meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
Considerare is a term of old English common law practice and appears primarily in English court records and treatises through the medieval period. It has no significant independent presence in civil law jurisdictions, where judgment terminology followed different Latin conventions. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or colonial American records that adopted English common law forms may encounter the term, but its primary research habitat is English plea rolls and Latin-language treatises predating the shift to English in court records.