Definition
Latin: "It is considered." A formal phrase appearing in the written record of common law judgments, historically used as the standard opening words by which a court's judgment was entered. The phrase signals that what follows is the judgment of the law itself — declared by the court after deliberation — rather than a mere expression of judicial opinion or discretion. Its companion form, CONSIDERATUM FUIT ("it was considered"), appeared in the same function in the past tense.
The phrase is not a substantive legal rule but a term of art belonging to the formal language of record-keeping in courts of law. Its significance is procedural and rhetorical: by opening a judgment with "consideratum est," the court framed its pronouncement as the inevitable result of legal reasoning rather than an exercise of will.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering CONSIDERATUM EST will find it almost exclusively in pre-modern English and American common law records, plea rolls, and reported cases from roughly the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. Its appearance marks a record as a formal enrolled judgment, not a preliminary order or interlocutory ruling.
The phrase is a navigational signal in historical sources: if a court record includes "consideratum est per curiam" or a close variant, what follows is the operative judgment. Researchers working with early American case reports — particularly those modeled on English forms — should expect the phrase in transcriptions of formal judgments well into the early nineteenth century, after which vernacular phrasing largely displaced it in American practice.
One trap worth noting: the phrase's presence does not guarantee that a judgment was final in the modern sense. In historical practice, "enrolled" judgments sometimes underwent later amendment or review. Researchers should not treat CONSIDERATUM EST as a reliable marker of finality without examining the surrounding procedural record.
The phrase also carries interpretive weight in understanding common law legal theory. The insistence that a judgment is "considered" — that is, the act of law declared by the court, not a personal pronouncement — reflects the classical fiction that judges find law rather than make it. This distinction was taken seriously in historical legal thought and appears in Blackstone and Coke in exactly that framing. Researchers working on legal philosophy, judicial power, or the nature of precedent will find the phrase a useful point of entry into that theoretical tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential definition: the phrase is "the style of judgments in actions at law," with the emphatic words implying "that the judgment is not that of the court, but the act of the law, pronounced and declared by the court, after due deliberation and inquiry." Burrill cites Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Com. 396), Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 39a), and Lord Raymond (1 Ld. Raym. 147, 148), along with Bracton (fol. 85) for the past-tense variant CONSIDERATUM FUIT.
These citations confirm that the phrase had deep roots — Bracton places it in thirteenth-century practice — and that it persisted as a recognized form through the period of Blackstone's writing in the eighteenth century. The agreement across Bracton, Coke, and Blackstone on both the form and its theoretical meaning is notable: all three treat the phrase as carrying the same jurisprudential freight, namely the subordination of judicial personality to the law itself.
What historical dictionaries do not address is the phrase's decline. Burrill, writing in the nineteenth century, documents the phrase in the present tense as if still in active use, but American and English court records of that period increasingly abandoned Latin forms. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as capturing a form that was already becoming archaic when he compiled it.
Jurisdictional Note
CONSIDERATUM EST belongs to the common law tradition and appears in English and early American records. Civil law jurisdictions used different formal conventions for entering judgments and will not contain this phrase. Within common law jurisdictions, the phrase was more consistently maintained in English practice than in American courts, where Latin formalism faded faster after independence.