Definition
A Latin term from the civil law and old English legal practice meaning, literally, "that which delays or puts off." DILATORIUS describes a category of procedural defense — specifically, an exception or plea raised by a defendant not to defeat the plaintiff's claim on its merits, but to delay or postpone the action itself. The term is the adjectival root from which the English "dilatory" in legal usage descends, and it appears in the foundational texts of medieval English common law as a descriptor for the class of exceptio per quam actio differtur — the exception "by which the action is deferred."
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Dilatory" means tending to cause delay; intended to gain time or defer action. Used generally of any slow or delaying behavior.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Dilatory" — tending to delay; given to procrastination; slow; tardy; as, dilatory in business.
The ordinary sense of "dilatory" carries a mildly negative connotation of sluggishness or procrastination. The legal-Latin DILATORIUS is more precise: it identifies a formally recognized procedural category, not a character failing. A defendant raising a dilatory exception was not necessarily acting in bad faith — the civil law acknowledged such pleas as legitimate procedural tools with defined rules governing their use and timing.
Why It Matters in Research
DILATORIUS is a term researchers will encounter almost exclusively in historical sources — Roman civil law texts, medieval English treatises (particularly Bracton and Fleta), and early common law pleading manuals. It does not appear as operative terminology in modern procedure. Its value in the Law Mind corpus is as a gateway term: identifying it correctly allows researchers to locate the surrounding doctrine of dilatory pleas, which has a continuous (though terminologically shifted) history from Roman law through English common law and into modern procedural systems.
Several research traps are worth flagging. First, DILATORIUS appears in Latin passages in Bracton and Fleta without translation or gloss; a researcher unfamiliar with the term may pass over it without recognizing its technical significance. Second, the distinction between dilatory and peremptory exceptions — central to civil law pleading — does not map cleanly onto modern common law categories of motion and defense. Researchers comparing historical and modern procedure must treat the mapping as approximate. Third, because the term is adjectival rather than a standalone noun, it appears in phrases (exceptio dilatoria, plea dilatorius) rather than as a headword in all historical dictionaries; searches limited to the standalone term may miss the bulk of relevant doctrine.
Corpus connections: DILATORIUS links directly to the broader cluster of civil law pleading doctrine in the Law Mind corpus, including EXCEPTIO, PEREMPTORY PLEA, PLEA IN ABATEMENT, and the historical treatment of pre-answer motions in equity. The Bracton and Fleta citations in Burrill anchor the term to a specific stratum of 13th-century English legal writing that drew heavily on Romanist categories.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source and provides a compact but reliable entry. He correctly identifies the term's Latin origin (differre, to put off), its civil law and old English law context, and its core application to the defendant's delaying exception. The cross-references to Bracton (fol. 399b), Fleta (lib. 6, c. 36, § 3), and the Institutes (4.13.8, 10, 11) are the key primary sources for anyone pursuing the doctrine in depth.
What Burrill does not do — and what researchers should supply from other sources — is explain the full taxonomy of dilatory exceptions under Roman and civil law, which distinguished among pleas going to the court's jurisdiction, the capacity of the parties, defects in the form of the action, and temporary bars to suit (such as agreements to postpone litigation). The single-sentence Burrill entry treats DILATORIUS as a pointer to the fuller entry on "Dilatory plea," which carries more of this explanatory weight. Researchers should follow that cross-reference rather than treating the DILATORIUS entry as self-sufficient.
No meaningful divergence between historical sources exists here, because Burrill is the sole dictionary source for this term. The Romanist and common law treatise literature is consistent in its use of the term.
Jurisdictional Note
DILATORIUS as a term is confined to Roman civil law and the English common law tradition influenced by it. Civilian jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, mixed systems) may carry more direct lineage from the Roman exceptio dilatoria into modern procedural codes, making the term more analytically relevant when researching those systems alongside English common law sources.