Definition
Conspiratione (also De Conspiratione) was an ancient common law writ directed against conspirators. It provided a remedy for persons injured by a criminal conspiracy — most commonly a false prosecution or the procuring of an indictment through corrupt means. The writ functioned as a civil action enabling the victim of such a conspiracy to seek damages against those who had combined unlawfully to his prejudice.
The term is Latin, reflecting its origin in the medieval English writ system. It does not describe the substantive offense of conspiracy itself, but rather the procedural instrument by which a wronged party pursued redress.
Common Confusion
Conspiratione is not a synonym for conspiracy. Conspiracy names the underlying offense or civil wrong — the unlawful agreement itself. Conspiratione names the writ: the formal legal process by which relief was sought against those guilty of that wrong. Historical sources occasionally conflate the two because the writ's name tracks the offense, but the distinction matters in archival research. A source referencing conspiratione is describing procedure; a source referencing conspiracy or conspirators is describing substance.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively encountered in pre-modern English legal materials — Year Books, early common law treatises, and the Registers of Writs. Researchers working in colonial American legal history or English legal history before the nineteenth century may encounter it in pleading records, form books, or abridgments.
Two navigational points:
First, the primary sources cited in the historical dictionaries — Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) — are the authoritative references for the writ's form and operation. Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium at folio 114 and Reg. Orig. at 134 are the consistent citations across all four source dictionaries. Any researcher tracing the writ's actual content should go to those sources directly.
Second, Burrill's Law Dictionary routes the researcher to the expanded entry under De Conspiratione rather than providing independent content here. In Law Mind corpus research, this means the operative entry is under the "De" form, and a search limited to "Conspiratione" alone may miss the fuller treatment. Check both headwords.
Because the writ fell into disuse as the common law action for malicious prosecution and the substantive law of conspiracy developed independently, modern legal dictionaries do not carry it as a live entry. It appears in historical dictionaries as an artifact of the writ system, not as a term of current practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in essential agreement: Conspiratione was an ancient writ against conspirators. Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence give substantively identical one-sentence definitions, each citing Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and the Registrum Omnium Brevium. Rapalje & Lawrence adds a brief companion entry for "Conspirators" immediately following, defining them as persons guilty of conspiracy — a useful confirmation that the dictionary authors understood conspiratione as procedural and conspirators as substantive.
Burrill's treatment is the least expansive, functioning only as a cross-reference to De Conspiratione. This is a reminder that Burrill frequently consolidates related writ entries under a single headword rather than repeating content.
None of the historical dictionaries explain the writ's operation in depth — when it lay, what damages were available, how it compared to the later action for malicious prosecution, or why it fell into disuse. Researchers requiring that level of detail must consult Fitzherbert and the Register directly, or secondary works on the history of the English writ system.
Jurisdictional Note
Conspiratione was an English common law writ and was never a significant feature of American practice. American jurisdictions that inherited the common law received the underlying principle — that a wrongful conspiracy causing injury is actionable — but addressed it through malicious prosecution and, later, through the modern law of civil conspiracy rather than through any writ form.