Definition
Latin and Law Latin phrase meaning "with the assent of the court." Used in older common law records and reports to indicate that a judgment, ruling, or other judicial act was made with the express agreement or concurrence of the court as a whole, rather than by a single judge acting alone or on a divided bench. The fuller form, ex assensu totius curiae, means "with the assent of the entire court" and carries the added weight of unanimous judicial agreement.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears almost exclusively in early English law reports and year books, where it served a functional purpose: signaling that a judgment carried the authority of full bench consensus. Researchers working in pre-modern case law will encounter it as a term of art embedded in the reporting style of the period rather than as a defined legal concept standing on its own. It is not a doctrine or cause of action — it is a notational convention.
The distinction between ex assensu curiae and ex assensu totius curiae is not merely stylistic. In a period when bench composition was variable and dissent was not always formally recorded, noting that the entire court assented was a meaningful evidentiary statement about the strength and finality of the ruling. Researchers should treat the fuller form as the stronger signal of unanimity.
This phrase will not appear in modern legal databases under keyword searches for substantive legal concepts. It surfaces as embedded Latin in quoted historical opinions, in treatises discussing early English procedure, and in Law Latin glossaries. If you encounter it mid-citation or mid-quotation in a historical source, it is describing the posture of the court at the moment of judgment, not a separate legal principle to be researched independently.
Corpus researchers should also note the relationship between phrases of this type — ex assensu curiae, ex relatione, ex parte — which together form a vocabulary of judicial posture and attribution used consistently across early English law reporting. Understanding one helps decode the others.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the definition and supports it with a single illustrative passage: "Ex assensu totius curia, Crew, C. J. gave judgment quod quærens nil capiat." (Latch, 139.) The passage is instructive in two respects. First, it shows the phrase functioning as a predicate — not as a holding or a rule, but as a descriptive framing device for the judgment that follows. Second, the substantive result given ("quod quærens nil capiat," meaning "that the plaintiff take nothing") is entirely separate from the ex assensu language itself, which does no more than attribute that result to the unanimous court.
Burrill does not elaborate beyond the definition and example, which accurately reflects the term's nature: it is narrow, technical, and historically bounded. No broader doctrinal content is hiding behind it. Historical dictionaries that omit this phrase entirely — as many do — are not missing a significant legal concept, only a piece of court-reporting vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase is a feature of English common law reports and has no independent life in American jurisdictions. It may appear in American legal writing only where early English authorities are quoted or discussed.