Definition
Consideratio curiae (Latin: "the consideration of the court") is a formal term for the judgment of the court. In classical common law pleading, when a court rendered its judgment, the record would recite the judgment as the act of the court itself — the court's own deliberate conclusion — rather than as an order imposed from outside. The phrase appears most often in the concluding formulae of formal pleadings and enrolled judgments, where it signals that what follows is the court's authoritative determination of the matter.
The term is not a substantive legal doctrine but a term of art belonging to the technical vocabulary of formal record-keeping and pleading. Its significance is structural and historical: it marks the point in a written legal record where the court's judgment is formally pronounced.
Common Confusion
Consideratio curiae should not be confused with consideration in the law of contracts — the doctrine requiring something of value exchanged to support a binding promise. The Latin root consideratio appears in both contexts, but the meanings are entirely unrelated. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry for this term illustrates exactly this confusion: the historical dictionary pivots mid-entry from the court judgment meaning into an extended discussion of contractual consideration, apparently the result of a typographical or editorial collision between adjacent entries. Researchers encountering that source should be alert to this disruption and treat the contract-consideration material as belonging to a separate entry.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with enrolled judgments, plea rolls, or formal court records from the medieval and early modern English common law period will encounter this phrase — or its English equivalent "it is considered by the court" — as a standard component of judgment records. Recognizing it as the formal pronouncement of judgment, rather than as a substantive legal concept, prevents misreading the structure of historical pleading documents.
The phrase matters most when reading Year Books, plea rolls, or early printed reports where Latin formulae punctuate the record. The transition from Latin to English in court records (formally completed in England by the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730) means that post-1730 English records will typically use the English equivalent rather than the Latin phrase, while records before that date may use either, depending on court and period. Researchers moving across that transition should recognize both forms as equivalent.
Because the term appears in record formulae rather than in substantive argument, it will not appear in indexes organized by legal doctrine. It is a paleographic and diplomatic term as much as a legal one — more relevant to reading records than to understanding law.
The Rapalje & Lawrence source presents a specific research trap: the entry breaks off and bleeds into the contract consideration entry, meaning any researcher relying on that source for this term will receive incomplete and misleading information. Black's Law Dictionary gives the correct, terse definition. Cross-referencing both sources is essential here precisely because the longer source is the less reliable one for this entry.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary offers the definition in its most stripped-down form: "the judgment of the court." This is accurate and sufficient for the term's core meaning.
Rapalje & Lawrence nominally agrees — opening with the same definition — but the entry is editorially compromised. It pivots almost immediately into a discussion of contractual consideration, complete with a citation to Bainbridge v. Firmstone (1838) and analysis of detriment as consideration. This material has nothing to do with consideratio curiae and appears to be the result of entries running together in the source. The Bainbridge citation and surrounding analysis belong to a discussion of the doctrine of consideration in contract law, not to the court judgment formula. Researchers should treat the Rapalje & Lawrence entry for this term as truncated and unreliable beyond its opening sentence.
Neither source addresses the paleographic or diplomatic context in which the phrase actually appears — the formal structure of plea rolls and enrolled judgments — leaving a gap that standard legal dictionaries do not fill. For that context, records scholarship and guides to Latin in legal records are more useful than legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is specific to the English common law tradition and the formal Latin pleading system derived from it. American courts adopted common law pleading forms, and early American enrolled judgments may carry equivalent formulae, but the Latin phrase itself largely disappears from American practice with the shift to code pleading in the nineteenth century.