Definition
A Latin term meaning "being sick" or "being indisposed." Appearing in older English law reports, egroto was used as a brief notation to record that a judge or other official was ill and therefore absent from proceedings. The term functions as a descriptive annotation rather than a term of legal art with substantive legal effect — it explains a participant's absence from court, nothing more.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering egroto in early English case reports should understand it as a reporter's notation, not a legal holding or procedural term. Its appearance signals that a named judge — most often identified immediately before or after the term — was absent due to illness on the date in question. This matters for reconstructing the composition of a court at the time of a decision: a divided or closely reasoned ruling may carry less weight, or its authority may need reassessment, if a key judge was absent.
The sole reported instance in the Law Mind corpus appears in the notation "Holt egroto" at 11 Mod. 179, indicating that Chief Justice Holt was ill and not sitting when that case was heard. Researchers working in the early modern English reports — particularly the Modern Reports series, which covers the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — should watch for this and similar Latin notations used to explain judicial absences. Such notations were informal shorthand by law reporters rather than standardized procedural language, so their form varies across reporters and periods.
Because egroto appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth century English reports, it will not be found in American materials and is unlikely to appear in any common law jurisdiction's modern case law. Its research relevance is essentially confined to historical English legal materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) defines the term concisely: "O. Lat. Being sick or indisposed. A term used in some of the older reports. 'Holt egroto.' 11 Mod. 179." This entry is brief by necessity — the term has no doctrinal content to elaborate. Black's correctly frames it as a term of the older reports rather than a living legal concept. No meaningful divergence exists among historical sources on this point, and the term does not appear to have generated scholarly commentary beyond its incidental use as a reporter's notation.
The Modern Reports (cited as "Mod." in the older tables of abbreviations) were published in multiple series covering English cases roughly from the Restoration through the early eighteenth century. References to judicial health in that period reflect the practical realities of courts sitting only when sufficient judges were present — making such notations genuinely informative to contemporaneous readers.