Definition
De medietate lingue (Latin: "of the half tongue") was a common law procedural right entitling an alien party to a jury composed equally of natives and aliens of the same foreign nationality. In practice, this meant that where a party to civil or criminal proceedings was an alien, the jury of twelve would be drawn half from denizens or subjects of the realm and half from aliens — ideally those sharing the foreign party's language or national origin — on the theory that a person unfamiliar with local customs and law deserved judgment from peers who understood his circumstances. The right did not guarantee jurors who spoke the party's language in the modern linguistic sense; rather, "tongue" operated as a near-synonym for nationality or people.
Common Confusion
The phrase is sometimes misread as guaranteeing a bilingual jury in the contemporary linguistic sense — that is, a jury capable of translating testimony or legal proceedings. This is incorrect. The word "lingue" (tongue, language, people) was used in medieval legal Latin to signify nationality or ethnic community, not spoken-language competency. The right was about juridical kinship, not simultaneous interpretation. Researchers encountering the phrase in historical sources should not conflate it with modern constitutional or statutory rights to translation or interpreter services, which rest on entirely different doctrinal foundations.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a historical artifact. The right of de medietate lingue was abolished in England by statute (Naturalization Act 1870, 33 & 34 Vict. c. 14) and was never firmly transplanted into American federal practice, making it a reliable marker of pre-nineteenth-century common law pleading and procedure sources. When the phrase appears in a historical corpus document, it signals a dispute involving a foreign merchant, diplomat, or resident alien and often indicates the case arose in a trading or port jurisdiction where alien litigants were common.
Several research traps attend this term. First, Bouvier's standard entry for "De Medietate Lingue" redirects to "Medietate Linguae" — researchers must check both headwords in Bouvier-derived sources or they will miss the substantive discussion. Second, Burrill preserves the cross-reference to "Bilinguis" (the adjectival Latin form meaning "of two tongues"), which appears in some older English abridgments and Year Books as an alternative label for the same jury type; failure to search that variant will produce gaps in a historical corpus survey. Third, Blackstone discusses the mixed jury in both the civil (3 Bl. Com. 360) and criminal (4 Bl. Com. 352) contexts in separate volumes, so researchers using a segmented corpus may find only half the relevant treatment. Fourth, the procedural mechanism is closely related to the law merchant's special tribunals and to the rights of alien merchants under Magna Carta and the Statute of Merchants, meaning that documents invoking de medietate lingue often cluster with other commercial law materials even when the surface subject appears criminal.
American sources after roughly 1800 treat the doctrine as English common law background rather than operative practice, though some early state court opinions discuss whether the right survived reception of the common law. Researchers working on immigrant communities, maritime law, or early commercial litigation should note that the absence of the phrase from American sources does not necessarily mean the underlying equity concern was ignored — it may simply have been addressed through other procedural vehicles.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill provides the fullest treatment of the three shelf sources, specifying that the jury consisted of one half denizens or natives and one half aliens, and that the right applied in both civil and criminal actions. His citation to Staundforde's Pleas of the Crown (lib. 3, c. 7) and to both volumes of Blackstone grounds the doctrine firmly in classical common law authority. Black's preserves the core definition but the entry appears truncated in the available text, breaking off mid-sentence at the description of the alien party. This truncation is worth flagging for corpus researchers: the complete Black's entry elaborates the procedural mechanics that the surviving excerpt omits.
Bouvier's handling is the most idiosyncratic: the entry for "De Medietate Lingue" contains only a cross-reference, immediately pivoting to "De Medio" — a structurally unrelated writ. Researchers relying on Bouvier must navigate to the "Medietate Linguae" headword to find substantive content, and should be alert to the possibility that other Bouvier cross-references in the same neighborhood (De Medio, De Melius Inquirendo) may appear in proximity in a full-text corpus search, potentially generating false positives.
None of the three dictionaries addresses the abolition of the right or its fate in American jurisdictions, which is consistent with their general treatment of procedure: they record the doctrine as it stood at common law without tracking statutory repeal. Researchers should not infer from dictionary silence that the right remained operative in later periods.
Jurisdictional Note
The right was a creature of English common law and was formally abolished in England in 1870. American jurisdictions generally did not adopt it as operative practice, though early federal and state courts occasionally acknowledged its common law existence. It has no counterpart in modern American or Commonwealth jury selection law.