Definition
In practice, a proceeding, action, or matter is said to be *depending* when it is currently pending before a court or other tribunal — that is, it has been commenced but not yet resolved or determined. The term signals an active, ongoing status: the matter is in progress and no final judgment or disposition has been entered.
The word is used as an adjective to describe the state of a legal proceeding at a given moment in time. A suit *depending* is a suit alive in the court's docket, neither dismissed nor decided.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Suspended or hanging from another element, such as a shield, helmet, crest, or a badge hanging from a chain.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Hanging down; pendent; contingent; relying on for support.
Editorial note: The ordinary English sense of "depending" carries the idea of physical suspension or conditional reliance — something hanging from or contingent upon something else. The legal usage is more technical and narrower: it describes the procedural status of a matter before a tribunal, not a conditional relationship between two things. A researcher encountering "depending" in a legal context should read it as a synonym for "pending," not as a conditional ("depending on") or structural ("hanging from") usage.
Common Confusion
DEPENDING vs. PENDING: These terms are functional synonyms in legal practice, and the historical dictionaries treat them as interchangeable. "Pending" has become the dominant modern term, while "depending" is now largely archaic in American legal writing. Researchers should not assign any difference in meaning between the two when encountered in historical sources. See PENDING.
DEPENDING vs. CONTINGENT: A matter that is *depending* is one already in progress before a tribunal. A matter that is *contingent* is one that may or may not arise based on a future event. These are distinct concepts: a claim can be both depending (already filed) and contingent (outcome uncertain), but the terms operate on different axes.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research risk with "depending" is mistaking an archaic procedural term for modern conditional language. In historical pleadings, writs, statutes, and equity documents, phrases like "a cause depending in this court" or "suits depending before the court" signal that a proceeding was live and unconsumed — a fact with potential significance for issues of jurisdiction, abatement, res judicata, or the timing of subsequent filings.
When parsing historical equity pleadings or early common law documents in the Law Mind corpus, treat "depending" as a status marker for litigation. A bill or suit described as "depending" confirms that proceedings were formally initiated and remained open. This can be relevant when tracing whether a matter was actually litigated to conclusion or quietly lapsed.
The shift from "depending" to "pending" as the preferred term tracks the general modernization of English legal vocabulary across the nineteenth century. Researchers working with pre-1850 materials will encounter "depending" with much greater frequency than those working with twentieth-century sources. The transition is gradual, not abrupt, and both forms appear in overlap periods.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill's — provide identical or near-identical definitions: "pending or undetermined; in progress." The uniformity is itself informative: this was a settled, uncontested term with no meaningful doctrinal dispute about its meaning. All three sources cite the same authority, 5 Coke 47, grounding the term firmly in early English common law practice.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the decline of the term. They treat "depending" as current usage, reflecting the vocabulary of their era. Researchers should supply for themselves what the historical dictionaries cannot: that "depending" is now largely a period term, and that encountering it in a modern document would be unusual enough to warrant attention.
Jurisdictional Note
No significant jurisdictional variation attaches to this term. Its meaning was consistent across common law jurisdictions. The shift to "pending" as the preferred modern synonym occurred across American and English legal practice without producing divergent local definitions.