Definition
Dies in banco (Latin: "day in bench") refers to a day appointed for the transaction of judicial business in a court sitting in banc — that is, the full court assembled together, as distinguished from a single judge sitting at nisi prius or on circuit. In the common law tradition, particular days were designated throughout the legal term when the full bench of a superior court, most notably the Court of Common Pleas (Common Bench), would hear motions, receive returns of writs, enter judgments, and conduct other formal business that required the authority of the court as a whole rather than a single justice. These days functioned as the structural calendar of the court's plenary sessions.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to the procedural vocabulary of the pre-modern English common law courts and will surface primarily in historical English materials — writs, plea rolls, and treatises — rather than in American sources. Researchers working with medieval or early modern English legal records should understand that dies in banco operated as a term of art tied to the formal legal calendar, which was itself divided into the four terms (Hilary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas). Missing returns or actions recorded as occurring on a dies in banco are keyed to these term-day structures, and misreading the calendar can distort a researcher's understanding of procedural timelines in historical cases.
The phrase is functionally inseparable from its companion concept, "days in bank" (sometimes spelled "days in banc"), which is the anglicized form used in later English and early American practice writing. Burrill himself cross-references Days in Bank, signaling that the two forms appear interchangeably across the corpus. In American historical sources, the Latin form dies in banco is largely displaced by the anglicized expression, so researchers should pursue both headings.
The distinction between sitting in banc and sitting at nisi prius is critical for understanding what procedural acts could be taken on any given day. Matters requiring the full court — entry of judgment, hearing of motions in arrest of judgment, writs of error — had to occur on a dies in banco. Actions at trial before a single judge at nisi prius occupied a different procedural track entirely. Confusing the two in historical records leads to errors in reconstructing case chronology.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise, defining dies in banco as a day in the Court of Common Bench and directing readers to Blackstone's Commentaries (Book 3, at 277) and Bracton (fol. 361–362). This dual citation is instructive: the range from Bracton (thirteenth century) to Blackstone (eighteenth century) confirms that the term remained a durable fixture of English procedural law across five centuries without substantial change in meaning. Burrill adds no independent analysis beyond the cross-reference to Days in Bank, which is where he develops the concept more fully.
Blackstone's treatment in the Commentaries situates dies in banco within the broader explanation of the English term system and the distinction between in-banc business and nisi prius proceedings — the same structural distinction that governs the term's practical significance. Historical dictionaries generally do not elaborate on dies in banco beyond its calendrical and jurisdictional function, and none introduce meaningful ambiguity about its meaning. The term is among the more stable entries in the historical legal lexicon: it describes a procedural fact (when and where the full court sat) rather than a contested legal concept.
What historical sources tend not to address is how American jurisdictions adapted or abandoned the concept as the English term system was replaced by more flexible court calendaring. American legal practice moved away from fixed term days early in the nineteenth century, which effectively rendered dies in banco obsolete in domestic usage — a gap that neither Burrill nor contemporaneous American dictionaries explicitly theorize, though the absence of the term from later American practice manuals reflects it.
Jurisdictional Note
Dies in banco is a term of English common law origin and has no meaningful independent life in American jurisdictions. It appears in American legal writing only historically, in commentary on English procedure or in early colonial and post-Revolutionary materials that imported English procedural frameworks.