Definition
An abbreviation used in legal texts and court records with two principal meanings:
1. Contra. Short for the Latin contra, meaning "against" or "on the other side." Appears in case citations, legal opinions, and commentary to signal an opposing authority, a dissenting view, or the respondent's position.
2. Continued (also: continue). A clerical and docket abbreviation indicating that a matter has been carried forward to a later date or that a proceeding remains pending. In court records, scheduling orders, and case management documents, "cont." signals an adjournment or extension of a scheduled event.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Abbreviation of "continue" or "continued."
Historical common usage: Not a standard Webster's 1913 entry as an independent term; treated as a routine shorthand.
Editorial note: In ordinary written English, "cont." almost exclusively signals that text or content continues on another page or at a later point. In historical legal sources, however, the dominant sense is Latin — contra — pointing toward adverse authority or the opposing party. A researcher encountering "cont." in an older legal opinion or digest should not assume the modern clerical meaning; the context (citation string versus docket notation) determines which sense applies.
Common Confusion
The two meanings pull in opposite directions and are easily conflated when context is thin. "Cont." appearing in a string of citations or a treatise footnote almost certainly abbreviates contra and signals that the cited authority stands against the proposition being argued. "Cont." appearing in a docket entry, minute order, or scheduling notation almost certainly means continued. Misreading the first as the second causes a researcher to overlook adverse authority; misreading the second as the first produces nonsense in procedural records. When the abbreviation appears without surrounding context, treat the source type — citation string versus procedural document — as the primary disambiguation tool.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a small but consequential abbreviation in historical legal research. In older reporters and treatises, contra citations were frequently compressed to "cont." without further gloss, meaning an entire line of opposing authority could be buried in what looks like incidental punctuation. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus with early English reports (the "Rep. in Ch." tradition Burrill flags) should scan citation strings carefully; a "cont." following a string of supporting authorities is a signal that the question was contested, not settled.
On the docket and procedural side, "cont." appears with high frequency in 19th- and early 20th-century American court records, minute books, and clerk's notations. Its meaning there is stable and clerical, but its informality means it was never standardized — some clerks used "contd.," some "cont'd," and some "cont." interchangeably. When reconstructing the procedural history of a case from archival or digitized records, treat all three variants as equivalent.
The abbreviation has no independent legal significance beyond its referential function. It does not name a doctrine, a right, or a cause of action. Its research value is entirely navigational: it tells you where to look next (the opposing authority) or what happened to a proceeding (it was deferred).
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary identifies "cont." solely as an abbreviation of contra, citing Coke's Reports (Co. 70), Wooddeson's Lectures (1 Wooddes. Lect. xxxi, xxxii), and Reports in Chancery (Rep. in Ch. passim). Burrill makes no mention of the docket-continuation sense, which reflects the 19th-century lexicographer's focus on substantive and citation abbreviations over clerical shorthand. This is a meaningful gap: by the time Burrill was writing, American court clerks were already using "cont." extensively in the procedural sense, but that usage was considered too routine to warrant dictionary treatment. Researchers should not interpret Burrill's silence on the continuation meaning as evidence that the usage was absent — only that it was beneath notice as a matter of legal vocabulary.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind shelf addresses this abbreviation independently.