Definition
De corpore comitatus is a Latin phrase meaning "from the body of the county." It describes the geographic pool from which a jury is drawn — specifically, the county at large — as opposed to a jury drawn from a particular neighborhood or vicinage. The distinction is between a general county panel (de corpore comitatus) and a local or neighborhood panel (de vicineto), the latter being the older common law preference for cases tied to a specific locality where jurors were presumed to have personal knowledge of the facts.
Common Confusion
De corpore comitatus is sometimes loosely associated with the modern constitutional right to a jury drawn from the district where the crime occurred, but the two are not the same. The constitutional vicinage right derives from the Sixth Amendment and corresponding state constitutional provisions; it concerns the location of the district, not the internal composition of the county panel. De corpore comitatus is a common law procedural concept about the summoning pool — the whole county versus a neighborhood — and it operated entirely within a single county's boundaries. Conflating the two obscures the historical development of jury-composition doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical sources treating jury composition and jury selection procedure. Researchers encountering it in older English or American cases are almost always in the context of a challenge to jury array — a dispute over whether the jury was properly summoned from the right geographic pool.
The de corpore comitatus / de vicineto distinction was a live procedural battleground in early English common law, when jurors were expected to know the facts at issue rather than decide solely on evidence presented in court. As the jury's function shifted from local knowledge to impartial fact-finding, the distinction collapsed in importance: drawing from the county at large became standard, and the de vicineto requirement faded into vestigial doctrine. By the time American courts were applying these principles, de corpore comitatus was largely the default and the phrase itself appears mainly in challenges to jury composition irregularities.
Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should watch for two traps. First, the phrase is frequently abbreviated or referenced obliquely in older reports — courts may simply cite Blackstone's Commentaries, volume 3 at page 360, rather than spell out the Latin. Second, do not conflate this jury-composition doctrine with the modern constitutional vicinage right under the Sixth Amendment, which is a distinct doctrine with its own development. The historical sources treat de corpore comitatus as a procedural rule about summoning the jury panel; modern vicinage analysis runs through constitutional text and federal/state statutory frameworks that never use the phrase.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree closely on the core definition: the phrase means "from the body of the county at large," and all route the reader to the same passage in Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Comm. 360). Burrill and Black's (1st edition) are nearly verbatim. Rapalje & Lawrence is the most economical, providing only the translation and a cross-reference to "Body of a County," indicating the editors treated this as a term of limited independent weight.
Black's 2nd edition adds the most useful information: it situates the phrase explicitly in the context of jury composition and supplies what purports to be a case citation (State v. Kemp, 84 Minn. 61, 24 N.W. 384). Researchers should verify that citation independently before relying on it, as the reporter and page details in older dictionary editions are not always accurate.
What the historical dictionaries uniformly omit is any analysis of when the distinction between de corpore comitatus and de vicineto became effectively obsolete in American practice, and they offer no guidance on how the principle connects (or fails to connect) to the constitutional vicinage requirements that later absorbed the policy concern. Researchers should treat these entries as pointing to Blackstone and to older common law forms, not as a guide to modern doctrine.