Definition
A writ directed to the judges of a court commanding them to receive and admit a person's attorney to appear and act on that person's behalf in a pending proceeding. The writ operated as a compulsory order: where a court refused or failed to recognize an appointed attorney, the aggrieved party could obtain this writ to force the court's compliance. It belongs to the broader family of prerogative and supervisory writs used in English common law to control the conduct of inferior tribunals.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a historical English writ with no surviving procedural counterpart in modern American or English law. Researchers encountering the term will find it exclusively in early common law sources, writs registers, and historical treatises. Its practical significance ended with the consolidation of court procedure and the formal recognition of attorneys-at-law as officers of the court — a development that made the writ unnecessary.
Two reference works cited in the historical dictionary entries are worth locating in the Law Mind corpus: the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.), which catalogs the standard forms of original writs in English practice, and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, the principal practical guide to writ selection in pre-modern English pleading. Both are primary sources for this and related writs, and researchers tracing the procedural context of de attornato recipiendo should consult these works directly rather than relying solely on dictionary glosses.
The writ belongs to a cluster of supervisory instruments used to enforce litigants' procedural rights against uncooperative courts. Understanding it requires familiarity with the medieval and early modern English conception of the attorney's role: an attorney did not appear as of right in the modern sense but was formally admitted for a specific matter, and that admission could be contested or obstructed. The writ remedied precisely that obstruction.
Researchers should note that this writ operated at the intersection of two functions — controlling inferior courts and securing a party's procedural capacity — which later became separated into distinct doctrinal categories. Tracing those descendants in the corpus requires moving from writs vocabulary into the law of attorneys and court supervision.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries give substantively identical accounts: a writ to require courts to receive and admit an attorney for a party. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's agree on the core function and cite the same authorities — Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium and the Registrum Omnium Brevium — with minor variation in citation form. Bouvier's adds the Latin gloss ("for receiving an attorney"), which is useful confirmation that the name is purely descriptive of the writ's command.
None of the three entries elaborates on the procedural circumstances that gave rise to the writ, the grounds on which a court might have refused to admit an attorney, or the relationship of this writ to related instruments. Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium at folio 156 remains the best available source for the original procedural context, and researchers who need more than a definitional gloss will need to consult it directly.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ is a product of English common law procedure and was never adopted as a distinct instrument in American practice. It has no statutory or procedural counterpart in any U.S. jurisdiction. American courts developed the right to counsel and attorney admission through separate doctrinal channels.