Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "in judgment" or "in court" — that is, present before or brought into the tribunal for judicial proceedings. The phrase describes the state of parties or matters that have been formally placed before a court for decision. It is the equivalent of the Latin *in judicio* and signals that a proceeding has reached the stage at which the court exercises active jurisdiction over the parties and the subject matter before it.
Why It Matters in Research
EN JUGEMENT is a term of art drawn from the Law French stratum of English legal vocabulary, most relevant to researchers working with medieval and early modern common law sources — particularly Year Books, early English treatises, and plea rolls. Researchers encountering this phrase in historical documents should understand it as a procedural marker: it indicates that the parties have appeared and the matter is ripe for judgment, as distinguished from preliminary stages of process or pleading.
The phrase appears in Britton, the late thirteenth-century treatise on English law written in Law French under the name of Edward I, and is not commonly encountered in post-seventeenth-century legal writing as courts shifted progressively to Latin and then to English. Its appearance in a source is therefore itself a dating and context signal.
Researchers should be careful not to treat EN JUGEMENT as a substantive legal concept with evolving doctrine — it is primarily a phrase of procedural description. Its significance is linguistic and contextual: it places a proceeding in court and in a judgment-ready posture. Cross-referencing with Latin equivalents (*in judicio*, *coram judice*) is essential when tracing the same procedural concept across sources written in different legal languages.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole shelf-source entry for this term and treats it concisely: "In judgment; in or into court, (*in judicio*, q.v.)." Burrill supplies the illustrative phrase from Britton — *co'e les p'ties viendr' en jugement* ("when the parties shall appear in court") — which grounds the term in one of the foundational treatises of medieval English law. The entry's cross-reference to *in judicio* is useful, directing researchers to the Latin parallel that appears more frequently in later legal writing.
No other standard historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus treat this phrase independently. Its absence from sources like Jacob's Law Dictionary or Bouvier reflects the term's obsolescence by the time those works were compiled: by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Law French had largely fallen out of active legal use, and the phrase survived mainly as a historical artifact in annotated treatises and scholarly commentary on early English law.
Jurisdictional Note
EN JUGEMENT is a term of English legal history rooted in the Anglo-Norman legal tradition. It has no distinct American usage and does not appear as a term of art in any modern common law jurisdiction. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or other mixed legal systems may encounter analogous Law French phrases, but the specific term is properly confined to the English common law tradition.