Definition
"Difficult" does not carry an independent legal definition. Its significance in legal contexts arises almost exclusively from the compound phrase "difficult and extraordinary case," a term of art under New York practice that governed when a court could award enhanced or extra allowance of costs to a prevailing party. Outside that specific statutory context, "difficult" functions as an ordinary descriptive adjective applied to legal problems, cases, or questions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Hard, not easy, requiring much effort; hard to manage, uncooperative, or troublesome.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Hard to do or make; beset with difficulty; attended with labor, trouble, or pains; not easy; arduous. Also, hard to manage or please; not easily wrought upon; austere; stubborn.
The gap here is narrow but worth noting for research purposes: in ordinary English, "difficult" is purely descriptive and subjective. In the New York statutory phrase "difficult and extraordinary case," the word acquired a quasi-technical meaning requiring judicial determination based on defined criteria — the difficulty of the legal questions and the complexity of the litigation — not merely a party's or attorney's opinion that the matter was hard. Courts were expected to make an affirmative finding, making "difficult" a threshold legal conclusion, not an impression.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "difficult" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York case law should immediately ask whether it appears as part of the phrase "difficult and extraordinary case." That phrase was tied directly to New York's cost-allowance statutes, which permitted courts to award extra costs to prevailing parties in cases meeting that standard. The cases Black's cites — Standard Trust Co. v. New York, etc., R. Co., Fox v. Gould, Horgan v. McKenzie, and Dyckman v. McDonald — all interpret what qualifies a case under that standard, and they are the primary corpus for understanding how New York courts applied the test in practice.
A researcher reading those decisions will find that courts struggled to define "difficult" with precision. The term operated in tandem with "extraordinary," and courts generally required both elements to be satisfied. A case might be extraordinary in value or importance without being difficult in its legal questions, and vice versa. This distinction matters for accurately reading older New York litigation records, cost orders, and appeals.
Outside New York, "difficult" appears in judicial opinions as unstructured characterization — courts describing legal questions as difficult to justify extended analysis, to signal novel issues, or to explain departures from bright-line rules. In that general usage, it carries no technical freight and should not be read as a term of art.
Researchers should also be alert to the word appearing in equity practice more broadly, where "difficult" questions sometimes justified referral to a master or a more deliberate procedural approach, though this was usage by convention rather than statutory definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) does not define "difficult" as a standalone term. The entry instead points readers to the specific statutory phrase and directs them to the New York case law for its meaning — an unusual approach that signals the editors recognized the word had no general legal definition worth stating. This is itself informative: it confirms that as of the early twentieth century, "difficult" had no settled independent legal meaning and that its legal significance was entirely derivative of context.
The historical dictionaries are silent on any broader legal usage, which is appropriate. No competing definitions appear in the available sources, and there is no divergence to reconcile. The honest conclusion is that this is a common English word that occasionally appears in a narrow statutory formula, and the case law is the only authoritative source for what it means in that formula.
Jurisdictional Note
The "difficult and extraordinary case" standard was specific to New York practice and its cost-allowance statutes. Researchers working in other jurisdictions should not assume the phrase or its judicial gloss applies elsewhere. Other states had analogous cost-shifting provisions but used different language and different standards.