Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning a counter-plea — a pleading filed in opposition to another party's plea. The contraplacitum was the procedural vehicle by which a party answered, denied, or opposed a plea that had been entered against them. It is now obsolete as an operative term; modern pleading practice subsumes its function under responsive pleadings, answers, and replies.
Common Confusion
Contraplacitum and contrapositio are adjacent but not synonymous. Contrapositio carried the broader sense of any plea or answer, while contraplacitum was specifically a counter-plea — an opposition to a specific plea already entered, not simply any responsive filing. The two terms may be conflated in older records and secondary summaries.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a pure historical term. Researchers will encounter contraplacitum only in pre-modern English legal records, early equity proceedings, and treatises on common law pleading practice predating the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century. The term does not appear in American or post-Judicature Act English practice as a live procedural concept.
The key navigational point: contraplacitum and contrapositio are distinct, though sources sometimes run them together. Rapalje & Lawrence lists them in sequence, treating contrapositio as a "plea or answer" more broadly — a general responsive pleading — while contraplacitum is narrower and specifically counter-pleading in character. A researcher transcribing or indexing early pleading rolls should not treat these as interchangeable.
All four sources cite or implicitly rely on Townshend's Pleadings (Townsh. Pl. 61) as the primary authority. That reference is to George Townshend's work on common law pleading, an eighteenth-century practitioner's text. Researchers working backward from this dictionary term should locate that treatise rather than expect modern secondary sources to develop the concept further.
The term is unlikely to appear in American colonial or early republic sources with any frequency, but may surface in English Year Books, plea rolls, and early chancery records where Latin pleading terminology was standard.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries are in agreement on the core definition: contraplacitum means counter-plea. The entries are brief and largely identical, each tracing to Townshend's Pleadings. Burrill's is marginally more useful in directing the researcher to the related headword "Counterplea," suggesting that his dictionary treats the English-language form as the operative cross-reference point.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source to pair contraplacitum with contrapositio in the same entry sequence, flagging the related but distinct term. Blount's Nomo-Lexicon is cited there as the source for contrapositio, pointing to an even older layer of legal lexicography. Researchers needing to push further back should consult Thomas Blount's Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (1670), which was a foundational source for later English legal dictionaries and recorded Latin and Law French terminology in active use.
None of the historical dictionaries provide substantive procedural context — what triggered a contraplacitum, how it was framed, or its relationship to the broader architecture of common law pleading. For that, the researcher must go to Townshend directly or to Blackstone and Chitty on pleading.