Definition
A Latin pleading formula meaning "and this he prays may be inquired of by the country." It appeared at the conclusion of a plaintiff's pleading as the formal tender of an issue to be decided by a jury. By invoking this phrase, the plaintiff signaled that the disputed question of fact should be submitted to a jury of the country — that is, to a trial by jury — rather than resolved by the court on the pleadings alone.
The phrase is an artifact of the common law system of formal pleading, in which precise verbal formulas carried procedural weight. The "country" (*patria*) in this context means the jury, drawn from the community. The request (*petit*) that the matter be inquired into by the country was the plaintiff's standard mechanism for closing the pleadings and demanding jury resolution of a factual dispute.
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Common Confusion
The phrase is sometimes encountered in variant spellings, including the version "Et Hoc Petit Quod Inquiratur Per Patriam" — the *hoc/hoo* variation reflects early print conventions and phonetic transcription in older reports rather than a meaningful doctrinal distinction. Researchers should not treat variant spellings as separate legal terms. The phrase is also occasionally confused with the defendant's equivalent jury demand formula, *Et De Hoc Ponit Se Super Patriam* ("and of this he puts himself upon the country"), which performed the matching function on the defense side. The two formulas together completed the formal joinder of issue.
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Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears almost exclusively in pre-merger common law pleading contexts — English common law sources and American cases predating the adoption of code pleading in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Field Code reforms in New York (1848) and the eventual adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938), formal pleading formulas of this kind were abolished. Researchers encountering the phrase in primary sources should treat it as a marker that the document belongs to the era of common law special pleading.
In reading old reports and pleading records, the formula signals that the plaintiff has tendered issue on a question of fact and that the next procedural step would be empaneling a jury. Its presence or absence in a pleading record can help researchers reconstruct the procedural posture of a case — whether the parties had reached issue, and whether that issue was one of fact or of law.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that this formula clusters with related pleading vocabulary: *similiter*, *mise*, *joinder of issue*, and *venire facias*. Sources that contain this phrase will typically be found in treatises on common law pleading (Chitty, Stephens, Gould) or in early American and English case reporters where pleadings were reproduced in full.
One practical trap: the phrase is often rendered in italics, abbreviated, or partially translated in secondary sources, which can make it harder to locate through keyword searches. Searching for the English translation ("inquired of by the country") in addition to the Latin may surface relevant passages that the Latin search misses.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only direct dictionary treatment in the available sources. It defines the phrase concisely — "And this he prays may be inquired of by the country. The conclusion of a plaintiff's pleading, tendering an issue to the country" — and cites 1 Salk. 6, a reference to Salkeld's Reports, an early English law report. The translation Black's offers is accurate, and the functional description is correct.
What Black's does not explain, and what historical dictionaries generally leave implicit, is the systemic role of this formula within the broader architecture of common law pleading. The phrase was not merely courtesy language; it was operative. Without a proper tender of issue, the pleadings were incomplete and the action could not proceed to jury trial. The formula's rigidity also meant that departures from it — even minor ones — could be fatal to a pleading before courts that enforced formal requirements strictly.
Older English law dictionaries (Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary) treat similar pleading formulas under entries for *joinder of issue* and *issue* but do not always extract this specific phrase for standalone treatment. Researchers should cross-reference those entries when working with sources that predate Black's.
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Jurisdictional Note
This formula is a product of English common law pleading and was carried into early American practice. Its use was confined to jurisdictions following the common law forms of action and was extinguished wherever code pleading or rules-based civil procedure was adopted. It has no operative meaning in modern American or English litigation.
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