Definition
"By the advice of the court" or "by the direction of the court." A Latin maxim used in historical English and common law practice to indicate that an act, judgment, or procedural step was taken at the court's direction or with its formal sanction — as distinguished from an act taken unilaterally by a party. The phrase signals that the court itself was the authorizing or directing force behind a given action, rather than mere party initiative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears most naturally in older English common law reports, Year Books, and formulaic pleading records where Latin phrases carried operative legal weight. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century English case law or colonial American records may encounter it in procedural contexts — particularly where the court's authorization of an act needed to be affirmatively noted in the record to give that act legitimacy or to distinguish it from ex parte conduct.
The phrase is not a term of art with a distinct doctrinal content of its own; it is closer to a descriptive formula embedded in court records and judgments. Its significance lies in what it signals about the procedural posture of a proceeding: an act taken de concilio curie carries the court's imprimatur and cannot be treated as a private or unilateral step. This distinction mattered in historical practice because it could affect the validity of procedural steps, the running of time periods, and the liability of court officers who acted under court direction versus on their own authority.
Researchers should be aware that Latin court formulae of this type were progressively displaced in English courts following the mid-nineteenth-century procedural reforms (the Common Law Procedure Acts and, later, the Judicature Acts), and in American jurisdictions following the Field Code reforms beginning in 1848. Encountering this phrase in post-reform documents is unusual and may suggest either a highly conservative drafting style, a quotation from an older authority, or a document predating reform in that jurisdiction.
The truncated entry in Rapalje & Lawrence — cutting off mid-sentence into DE CONSANGUINEO — suggests the phrase was treated as sufficiently self-explanatory to require only a brief gloss, consistent with its function as a descriptive formula rather than a substantive legal concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define the phrase simply as "by the advice (or direction) of the court," which captures the phrase's dual sense accurately: concilium in classical and medieval Latin carries both the meaning of advice or counsel and of formal direction or decree, depending on context. In court usage, the directional sense typically predominates — the court is not merely advising a party but authorizing or ordering an act.
No other shelf sources in the Law Mind corpus appear to give the phrase extended treatment, consistent with its character as a formulaic expression rather than a term requiring doctrinal elaboration. Historical law dictionaries in the Latin-formula tradition (such as those of Cowell or Termes de la Ley) would be the natural next reference point for researchers needing fuller historical grounding, though those sources are outside the present corpus.