Definition
De falso judicio is a Latin phrase meaning "of false judgment." In historical English law, it refers to a writ used to challenge or reverse a judgment rendered in an inferior court — specifically a court of record below the level of common law courts — on the ground that the judgment was false or erroneous. The writ operated as a mechanism for appellate-style review before modern appeals procedures existed, directing the record of the inferior court upward for examination and correction.
The writ is sometimes treated as synonymous with the writ of false judgment, which is its English-language counterpart. Both describe the same procedural instrument.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears primarily in writs registers and treatise literature from the medieval and early modern English legal tradition. Researchers will encounter it most often in citation form — specifically through references to Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. Orig.) and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium (Fitzh. Nat. Brev.) — rather than in reported case law, because the writ largely predates systematic law reporting and fell into disuse as appellate courts and procedures modernized.
The key research trap here is treating de falso judicio as interchangeable with other error-correcting writs without accounting for the specific procedural context. The writ of false judgment was distinct from writ of error: writ of error applied to common law courts of record, while the writ of false judgment (de falso judicio) applied to inferior courts not of record, such as county courts and courts baron. Conflating the two will send a researcher down the wrong procedural lineage entirely.
For corpus researchers, the term is essentially a pointer. Finding de falso judicio in a source means the surrounding text concerns the correction of judgments in inferior non-record courts. The researcher's next step is the entries for FALSE JUDGMENT and WRIT OF ERROR, which carry the substantive doctrine forward and will have richer treatment across the historical sources.
American legal materials rarely engage with this writ directly. By the time American common law practice consolidated, the writ of error and eventually statutory appeals had displaced it. Its appearance in American legal dictionaries is primarily taxonomic — preserving the Latin form for identification purposes rather than practical use.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical sources consulted are in close agreement and largely identical in treatment. Black's first and second editions both define de falso judicio as "writ of false judgment" and cross-reference the same two authorities: Reg. Orig. 15 and Fitzh. Nat. Brev. 18. Rapalje & Lawrence is equally terse, defining it as "a writ of false judgment" with the same register citation, then redirecting to WRIT OF FALSE JUDGMENT.
None of the historical sources provide substantive doctrinal exposition under this heading. All three treat the Latin phrase as an index entry pointing toward fuller treatment under the English-language equivalent. This is a recognized pattern for Latin writ names in nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries: the Latin form receives a brief translation and cross-reference; the English form carries the doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries do not address — and what researchers should not expect from them — is any procedural history distinguishing the writ from writ of error, or any account of when and how the writ fell out of use. For that, treatise literature from the English common law tradition is the necessary supplement.
Jurisdictional Note
De falso judicio is an English common law writ with no direct American statutory successor. American jurisdictions absorbed the underlying function — review of inferior court judgments — into their appellate and error-correction frameworks at an early stage. The term has no operational significance in any current American or English jurisdiction.