Definition
In old English law, a plea or answer filed in response to a claim or charge. The term is Latin (contra, "against" + positio, "position" or "placing") and translates literally as "counter-position." It denotes the formal act of a defendant or respondent setting out a contrary stance to the matter alleged against them in a legal proceeding.
Common Confusion
CONTRAPOSITIO (legal) should not be confused with contraposition as used in classical logic and philosophy. In logic, contraposition is a form of immediate inference — the transposition and negation of a conditional statement. The legal term refers to procedural opposition in pleading, not to any logical operation. The resemblance is purely etymological.
Why It Matters in Research
CONTRAPOSITIO is an archaic Latin law term that appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records and the glossaries that attempted to decode them. Researchers encountering it in medieval or early modern plea rolls, court records, or legal treatises should treat it as a functional synonym for "plea" or "answer" in the procedural sense — the defendant's formal response to a complaint or charge.
The term rarely appears outside its historical context. It does not survive into modern pleading vocabulary, having been displaced entirely by the English equivalents ("plea," "answer," "defense") as the courts of England progressively anglicized their procedural language from the sixteenth century onward. A researcher who encounters CONTRAPOSITIO in a primary source should not expect to find a body of case law refining or applying it; the term was largely descriptive rather than technical in the way that later common law pleading categories became highly formalized.
The principal trap in historical sources is mistaking the word for a term of logic or rhetoric. In classical and scholastic writing, "contraposition" carries a distinct meaning — a form of inference in which a proposition is converted by negating and transposing its terms (if A then B becomes if not-B then not-A). Legal sources using CONTRAPOSITIO in the procedural sense mean something entirely different: a litigant's counter-position in court, not a logical operation. Context — particularly the presence of related procedural terminology — is the reliable guide.
All three source dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus cite Blount (Thomas Blount, Nomo-Lexicon: A Law-Dictionary, 1670) as the authority for this entry, which suggests the term's visibility in the legal dictionary tradition derives substantially from that single seventeenth-century source rather than from independent common law development.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Burrill are in complete agreement on substance: CONTRAPOSITIO is an old English law term meaning a plea or answer, glossed as "counter-position," and attributed to Blount. The entries are nearly verbatim across all three dictionaries, indicating that later compilers drew directly from Black's or from Blount without independent elaboration.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is distinguish between the different procedural forms a "plea" could take in classical common law pleading — pleas in bar, pleas in abatement, general or special pleas — or situate CONTRAPOSITIO relative to those categories. Whether the term was used broadly to cover any defensive response, or more narrowly for a specific type of counter-pleading, the sources leave unanswered. Researchers needing that level of precision should consult primary materials from the period in which the term appears, rather than relying on the dictionary record alone.
The chain of attribution (all roads lead to Blount) is itself worth noting: it limits the depth of independent corroboration available in the historical dictionary tradition.