Definition
Latin: "a day given." A procedural continuance granted by a court to a defendant in a civil action — specifically, a formal postponement of proceedings allowing the defendant additional time before the case advanced further. The court, in effect, gave the defendant a day to which the matter was adjourned.
The term carried a technical distinction in historical practice: dies datus applied properly only to a continuance granted before the declaration was filed. Once the plaintiff had filed a declaration, any subsequent continuance granted to allow the defendant time to deliberate or respond was called an imparlance rather than a dies datus. The two terms thus mapped onto different procedural stages of the same underlying function.
Common Confusion
DIES DATUS vs. IMPARLANCE: These terms are closely related and easily conflated because both describe a continuance or period of delay granted to a defendant. The distinction is temporal and procedural. Dies datus was the appropriate term before the declaration was filed; imparlance followed the declaration. Researchers encountering either term in historical pleading records should note the stage of proceedings to understand which device was in use. Modern sources rarely preserve the distinction, and some historical sources use them loosely.
DIES DATUS vs. DIES JURIDICUS: An unrelated Latin phrase that appears in close proximity to dies datus in older dictionaries and abridgments. Dies juridicus means a "court day" — a day on which courts may lawfully sit and conduct business, as opposed to a dies non juridicus (a day on which courts cannot act). The two phrases address entirely different concepts: dies datus is a procedural grant of time; dies juridicus is a classification of calendar days.
Why It Matters in Research
Dies datus is a term of historical practice with no modern procedural equivalent by that name. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English common law materials, abridgments of pleading, and records from the common law courts. It surfaces in discussions of continuances, the structure of formal pleading, and the procedural architecture of actions at common law.
The terminological precision — dies datus before declaration, imparlance after — reflects how rigorously the common law categorized each stage of an action. Researchers working in historical court records or treatises on common law pleading should be alert to both terms and should not assume they are interchangeable. Sources that discuss one without reference to the other may be incomplete or are collapsing a distinction the original practice maintained.
Because the term does not survive into modern civil procedure under this name, it poses no jurisdictional puzzle today, but it does create a translation problem when reading historical materials: a dies datus is functionally a continuance, but labeling it simply a "continuance" in a modern summary loses the procedural stage information the original term encodes.
Burrill's entry usefully gestures toward Brooke's Abridgment under the heading "Continuance" as a primary source for fuller treatment — researchers working through the historical doctrine should follow that citation chain into the abridgment literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's agree on the core meaning: a day given to a defendant, amounting to a continuance. Both flag the technical limit — that the term was properly applied only before the declaration was filed. Burrill's entry additionally supplies the Latin plural form (dies dati, implied) and connects the term explicitly to Brooke's Abridgment, providing a research anchor that Black's does not.
Neither dictionary offers substantive discussion of how the device was obtained, what grounds were required, or how frequently courts exercised it — reflecting the limits of dictionary treatment for procedural terms that were more fully elaborated in the abridgments and pleading treatises. Neither source is incorrect; both are simply compressed.
The truncation visible in Burrill's entry as reproduced — cutting off mid-sentence into the adjacent entry for dies juridicus — is an artifact of abridged reprinting and not a gap in Burrill's original treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Dies datus was a term of English common law procedure and appears in materials from the English common law courts and their American successors. It does not appear as a term of art in equity practice or in civil law jurisdictions. American materials reflecting the period before code pleading (pre-1848 in most states) are the most likely contexts for domestic researchers to encounter it.