Definition
Et sic ad judicium is a Latin phrase from early English pleading practice meaning "and so to judgment." It appeared in the formal record of court proceedings to mark the point at which pleadings were closed and the matter was submitted to the court for decision. The phrase signaled that the parties had completed their exchanges of pleading — declaration, plea, replication, rejoinder, and whatever further steps the form of action required — and that the case had reached the stage where judgment could issue. It was not itself a request for judgment but rather a notational marker in the enrolled record indicating that procedural completion had been reached.
Common Confusion
Et sic ad judicium is sometimes loosely read as equivalent to a modern motion for judgment or a demand for relief. It is neither. The phrase is a record-keeping formula, not a pleading act or advocacy step. Its appearance in a Year Book or enrolled plea roll tells the researcher that the pleadings closed at that point — it does not describe what the court decided, how it decided, or what remedy followed. Researchers unfamiliar with common law pleading procedure occasionally treat it as substantively meaningful when it is purely formal.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, and abridgments drawn from them. Its significance to a Law Mind corpus researcher is almost entirely diagnostic: encountering et sic ad judicium in a source tells you the document is drawn from or imitating the formal pleading record of an English common law court, and that what follows the phrase (or what the record cuts off at) represents the conclusion of the pleading stage.
Several research traps apply. First, Year Book entries frequently stop at or near this point without recording the actual judgment, which means the phrase can mark the edge of the available historical record rather than a completed procedural act. Second, the phrase belongs to a family of similar Latin connective formulas used in formal pleading records (et sic de die in diem, et ideo, et sic ad diem, etc.), and researchers working quickly through Latin records may conflate them. Third, because the same citation — Yearbook Trinity Term 1 Edward II — appears in every historical dictionary entry for this term, it appears to be the sole or primary source from which all three dictionaries are working. This means the dictionaries are reporting the same single instance rather than a pattern of usage across the corpus, which limits how much can be inferred about how broadly the phrase circulated.
For researchers working on the history of pleading, the phrase is a useful index term for locating the formal structure of common law pleading records. It is not useful as a term of substantive law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: all three define the phrase as "and so to judgment" and all three cite the identical source, Yearbook Trinity Term 1 Edward II, folio 10. There is no divergence among the shelf sources and no elaboration beyond the translation and citation.
The uniformity is itself informative. It suggests that all three compilers were drawing from the same abridgment or secondary source rather than independently surveying pleading records, and that the phrase was treated as a term of historical curiosity rather than active practice by the time these dictionaries were compiled. None of the sources explains the procedural context in which the phrase appeared or distinguishes it from related formulas. Researchers needing depth beyond the bare translation must go directly to Year Book scholarship and to treatises on common law pleading such as Gould's Principles of Pleading or Stephen's Treatise on the Principles of Pleading, which address the structure of the pleading record in which this kind of formula appears.