Definition
A distringas nuper vice comitem (Latin: "that you distrain the late sheriff") is a writ commanding the distraint of the goods of a sheriff who has left office, in order to compel that former sheriff to perform duties he failed to complete while he held his position. It issues in two principal situations: (1) where the former sheriff failed to bring in the body of a defendant as required, or (2) where the former sheriff failed to sell goods that had been attached under a writ of fieri facias (fi. fa.) and was obligated to sell while still in office. The writ is directed at the former official personally, and operates by seizing his goods as compulsion.
Common Confusion
DISTRINGAS NUPER VICE COMITEM is sometimes loosely grouped with other distringas writs, but its target and function are specific. An ordinary distringas compels a defendant or witness to appear by distraining their goods. This writ is directed not at a litigant but at a delinquent public officer who has vacated his position — the compulsion runs against the former sheriff, not a party to the underlying action. Researchers should not treat references to distringas generally as covering this writ, nor assume the reverse.
Why It Matters in Research
This writ represents a narrow but revealing intersection of procedural law and the law of public officers. Its existence signals that English common law procedural practice treated the sheriff's ministerial duties — executing process, enforcing attachments — as obligations that survived the term of office. The writ was a mechanism for accountability after the fact.
Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century English or American common law records should be alert to several points. First, the writ appears almost exclusively in older procedural sources and practice manuals; it does not survive in modern American procedural law and has no statutory counterpart in the post-Field Code world. Finding a reference to this writ in a case record is a reliable indicator that the document dates from or is citing the common law writ practice of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
Second, the writ is functionally connected to the fieri facias. A researcher encountering a distringas nuper vice comitem in historical records should expect to find an underlying fi. fa. in the same file or on the same docket, and its absence may indicate incomplete records or misfiling.
Third, the writ illustrates a problem that recurred wherever elected or appointed sheriffs turned over on regular cycles: process begun under one sheriff might be left incomplete when a new sheriff took office. This gap in execution was a genuine procedural hazard. Understanding this writ helps researchers interpret the surrounding procedural history — including why a plaintiff might have faced delay, why a body was never produced, or why an attachment yielded no sale proceeds.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the sole source in the Law Mind corpus for this term and covers its essential content concisely. Bouvier identifies both triggering conditions — failure to produce a body and failure to sell attached goods under a fi. fa. — and cites Tidd's Practice for authority. The entry is characteristically terse and procedural, consistent with Bouvier's treatment of historical writs of limited modern application.
No divergence across dictionary sources is possible given the single-source coverage, but Bouvier's entry is reliable as far as it goes. What it does not address is the procedural mechanics of how the writ was served, what showing was required to obtain it, or how courts treated a former sheriff's resistance. For those details, the practitioner sources of the era — Tidd's Practice being the most directly cited — would need to be consulted directly. Blackstone and subsequent commentators touch on sheriff accountability generally but do not dwell on this specific writ form.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ is an English common law form. American courts in the colonial and early federal periods inherited and occasionally applied common law writ practice, but the writ had fallen out of active use by the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of statutory process and code pleading. Researchers should not expect to find modern authority on this writ in any American jurisdiction.