Definition
Latin: "And so it hangs." A phrase appearing in early English law reports to indicate that a legal point or plea was left undetermined at the conclusion of the reported proceeding — neither resolved by the court nor formally abandoned by the parties. The matter remained, as the phrase suggests, suspended.
A related form, et sic pendet placitum ("and so the plea hangs"), appears in the Year Books to signal the same unresolved status with respect to a specific pleading.
Common Confusion
Et sic pendet should not be confused with phrases indicating a pending action in the modern sense, such as lis pendens. Lis pendens refers to a doctrine with active legal consequences — notice of a pending suit affecting title to property. Et sic pendet is purely a reporter's notation, a historical annotation with no procedural effect of its own. It records suspension; it does not create it.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational marker specific to early English law reports and the Year Books. Researchers encountering et sic pendet in a historical source should treat it as a signal of incompleteness: the case or point cited cannot safely be read as authority for any proposition. The court did not rule; the reporter merely noted that the question remained open.
Several practical traps follow from this. First, a point annotated et sic pendet may have been resolved in a later term of court without the resolution appearing in the same report. Researchers relying on a single volume may mistake a suspended question for a settled one — or vice versa. Second, the phrase appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English reporters (the Year Books and the nominative reports of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). It will rarely if ever appear in American reports, and its absence from modern digests means researchers may encounter it only in primary source reading without indexing support. Third, when tracing the development of a common law doctrine, a case marked et sic pendet may represent a fork in the road — a moment when the law could have gone multiple directions — rather than a step in a linear progression.
The citation shared across all three source dictionaries — T. Raym. 168 — refers to Sir Thomas Raymond's Reports, covering King's Bench proceedings from the Restoration period. The Year Book citation in Burrill (T. 1 Edw.) places the extended form, et sic pendet placitum, in the reign of Edward I or II, establishing the phrase's deep antiquity.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree precisely on the definition and share the same illustrative citation (T. Raym. 168), reflecting the term's narrow, stable meaning. There is no substantive divergence among them.
Burrill adds value by providing the extended form — et sic pendet placitum — with its Year Book citation, which grounds the phrase in English legal practice several centuries earlier than the Raymond Reports reference alone would suggest. This is the only meaningful distinction among the three sources, and researchers working in Year Book materials should note the expanded form.
None of the three dictionaries address whether a point left hanging by et sic pendet was ever subsequently resolved, nor do they explain the procedural circumstances under which a reporter would use the phrase rather than simply omitting the case. Historical dictionaries treat this as a reporter's convention and go no further. Researchers seeking the underlying procedural context of any specific instance will need to look beyond the dictionaries to the reports themselves and any subsequent terms of court.
Jurisdictional Note
Et sic pendet is exclusively a feature of early English legal reporting. It has no recognized use in American legal practice or American case reporting at any period.