Definition
Days in bank (from the Latin *dies in banco*) refers to certain fixed, recurring days during a court term on which parties were required to appear, process was returnable, and other formal procedural business was conducted. The term originated in the English Court of Common Bench — historically called simply the "Bench" or "bank" — and designated the specific calendar dates on which the court was open to receive pleadings, writs, and appearances.
These days were not randomly assigned. They were spaced roughly a week apart throughout the term and were traditionally anchored to church feast days and religious festivals. Because the court conducted its business on these particular days rather than continuously, the entire procedural rhythm of common law litigation — when writs had to be returned, when parties had to appear, when defaults could be entered — turned on the calendar of days in bank.
A secondary but important legal fiction attached to this concept: the entirety of a court term could be treated as a single day for certain legal purposes. Matters submitted and decided within a term were, in the eyes of the law, deemed to occur simultaneously, collapsing the calendar into a single juridical moment. This fiction had practical significance in cases where events intervening between submission and decision — such as the death of a party — might otherwise disrupt the proceeding.
Common Confusion
"Bank" here has no connection to financial institutions. The word derives from the Latin *bancus* (bench), referring to the elevated bench where judges sat. The Court of Common Bench, or Court of Common Pleas, was colloquially called "the bank," and *dies in banco* meant simply "days at the bench." Researchers encountering "days in bank" in historical procedural texts should not associate the term with commercial banking or any financial context.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a historical artifact of English common law procedure. Researchers working with pre-19th century English court records, pleading manuals, or any source discussing the Court of Common Pleas will encounter it regularly. Its significance for corpus research lies in several areas.
First, the term is a procedural skeleton key. Understanding that litigation in the common bench moved on a fixed schedule of appearance days — not continuously — explains why writs, returns, and pleadings cluster around particular dates in historical records. A document dated outside a day in bank was procedurally irregular; finding such dates helps authenticate or contextualize archival sources.
Second, the legal fiction of the single-day term matters for interpreting decisions involving intervening events. Black's notes that if a party died between a state supreme court decision and the filing of a mandate from the U.S. Supreme Court reversing that decision, the fiction that the entire term is one day could affect how the court treated the timing. Researchers tracing early American appellate procedure will find this fiction applied — often without explanation — in 18th and early 19th century opinions.
Third, Bouvier's detail that a defendant was allowed three full days to appear after the return day (exclusive of the return day itself) is procedurally specific and not always flagged in secondary sources. This three-day grace period, governed by common law rather than statute, affected default judgments and is relevant when researching the historical development of appearance rules.
Finally, the term virtually disappears from American legal sources after the procedural reforms of the mid-19th century, particularly following the Field Code (1848) and subsequent code pleading reforms that replaced the common law term-and-day structure with continuous court sessions and fixed statutory deadlines. Researchers who find the term in post-reform American sources should treat it as a deliberate historical reference, likely in a treatise or scholarly context, rather than live procedural law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's are in close agreement on the core definition: fixed appearance and return days in the Court of Common Bench, spaced by church calendar. All three cite Blackstone's *Commentaries* (3 Bl. Comm. 277–278) as the primary authority, and Burrill adds a citation to Fleta (lib. 2, c. 35), the 13th-century English legal treatise, grounding the term in medieval practice.
Bouvier's is the most practically useful of the three for procedural detail, specifying the roughly weekly spacing of the days and the three-day appearance grace period. Black's contributes the legal fiction of the single-day term, which the other sources omit or treat only obliquely. Burrill's cross-references to *Bank*, *Bench*, and *Dies communes in banco* are useful navigational markers within the historical dictionary tradition — the Latin form *dies communes in banco* is an alternate name for the same concept and may appear in older English sources where the anglicized form does not.
None of the three dictionaries address the American reception of this term or its disappearance after procedural reform, which is a gap researchers should account for when using these sources to interpret 19th-century American materials.
Jurisdictional Note
Days in bank were a feature of English common law procedure, specific to the Court of Common Bench (Common Pleas). American courts inherited aspects of the underlying procedural structure in the colonial and early republic periods, but the specific institution of days in bank was never uniformly codified in the United States and was effectively displaced by code pleading reforms beginning in the 1840s. The term has no operative meaning in contemporary American, English, or Commonwealth procedure.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The encyclopedia entries on banking (banking regulation, the National Bank Act, FDIC) are not relevant to this term. "Days in bank" concerns court procedure, not financial institutions, and no encyclopedia cross-reference applies here.