Definition
In legal usage, DUB is a reporter's abbreviation for the Latin term *dubitatur*, meaning "it is doubted." When appearing in a case report, DUB signals that a judge or the court expressed doubt about a proposition of law without rendering a definitive ruling against it. It is a notation of judicial hesitation, not of dissent or outright rejection.
The closely associated term *dubitans* (doubting) performs a similar function when a named judge is recorded as doubting — as in the formulation "J. dubitans" — indicating that the identified jurist held reservations about the point being decided.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To make a noise by brisk drumbeats; to do something badly; to execute a shot poorly. In contemporary popular usage, "dub" most commonly means to give a nickname or title, or to overdub audio in film and music production.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To confer knighthood; to invest with a new dignity or character; to dress or smooth timber with an adz.
The gap between common and legal meaning is absolute. Neither the ceremonial sense (conferring knighthood) nor the modern informal senses (audio dubbing, doing something poorly) bears any relationship to the legal abbreviation. A researcher encountering "dub." in an early English report who consults only a general dictionary will find nothing useful. The legal meaning is entirely a function of Latin abbreviation convention, not of the English word.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English case reports — particularly those from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries — will encounter *dub.* as a marginal notation or inline abbreviation. Misreading it as anything other than *dubitatur* will cause the researcher to mischaracterize the court's position on the point at issue.
The practical significance is this: *dubitatur* notations identify points of law that were contested or uncertain at the time of decision. A proposition marked *dub.* was not settled law — it was live territory. For researchers tracing the development of a legal doctrine, these notations are valuable precisely because they mark fault lines in the common law as it was being made. A point that appears in one report as straightforwardly decided may appear in another as *dub.*, signaling that the profession itself was not satisfied.
The related notation *dubitans* attached to a named judge's position is similarly useful: it tells the researcher that a specific jurist — not merely an anonymous court — had reservations. This is the early reporting tradition's rough equivalent of a modern concurrence that questions the majority's reasoning without formally dissenting.
Researchers should also be aware that abbreviation conventions were not standardized across reporters. *Dub.* appears with reasonable consistency for *dubitatur*, but paleographic variation and individual reporter habits mean that close attention to context is always warranted. The abbreviation should not be confused with *dubitatur* used in a full-word form, which carries identical meaning but is easier to identify.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary handles this entry economically and accurately, treating DUB as a pure abbreviation and immediately cross-referencing *dubitatur* for the substantive explanation. Burrill also identifies the related form *dubitans* and supplies an illustrative reporter citation (1 Show. 364), which helpfully grounds the notation in actual practice.
What historical dictionaries generally do not address is the interpretive weight researchers should give these notations — that is, what it meant in practice when a court or judge entered a *dubitatur*. The dictionaries record the form without analyzing the function. For that, researchers need to consult work on the history of English case reporting itself.