Definition
A Latin term used in formal legal records meaning "it is considered." Consideratur is a verb form appearing in court judgments and formal entries, particularly in older common law practice, to introduce the judgment or determination of the court. It is the present-tense passive equivalent of consideratum est ("it has been considered"), and both forms were used interchangeably to signal that what follows is the official judgment rendered by the court.
Common Confusion
Consideratur and consideratum est were functionally equivalent in practice, though they differ grammatically — the former is present tense ("it is considered") and the latter is perfect tense ("it has been considered"). Courts and reporters used both forms without meaningful legal distinction, and the case authority shared across the historical dictionaries (2 Strange 874) explicitly treats them as identical in effect. Researchers encountering either form in old reports or roll entries should read them as the same operative phrase introducing the court's judgment. Neither term relates in any way to consideration in the contract law sense, a confusion that can arise when researchers scan historical sources for contract-related material.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a term of art from older common law pleading and record practice. Researchers are most likely to encounter consideratur in:
Printed law reports from the English common law tradition, particularly before the late eighteenth century, where formal Latin phraseology in the judgment portion of a record was standard.
Year Books and early abridgments, where the shift from Latin to English in pleading records was incomplete for the judgment clause long after vernacular English had taken over narrative portions of the record.
Roll entries and formal court documents where the judgment clause retained Latin even after surrounding text had been anglicized.
The practical research trap here is double: first, the term looks superficially related to "consideration" (the contract doctrine), which it is not. Second, its interchangeability with consideratum est means a search for one form may miss occurrences of the other in a corpus that has not normalized Latin variants. Any researcher working in pre-nineteenth-century English case law or American cases reproducing those forms should treat both phrases as markers of the formal judgment clause and search accordingly.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill's — offer identical core content: consideratur means "it is considered" and is treated as equivalent to consideratum est, citing 2 Strange 874 as authority. The uniformity here is notable and reflects how narrow and fixed this term's usage was. There is no jurisprudential development to track, no divergence among the dictionaries, and no evolution of meaning. The dictionaries are reliable as far as they go, but they go very little distance — none of them contextualizes the term within the broader history of Latin record-keeping in common law courts or explains when and why these phrases fell out of use. The entry in Black's 2nd Ed. includes appended text about consignation that is plainly a printing artifact from an adjacent entry and should be disregarded entirely when researching consideratur.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Pleading (Historical Common Law Forms); Court Records and Roll Practice.