Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "according to the saying" or "according to the verdict of the majority." In its primary legal application, ex dicto majoris partis juratorum means "according to the verdict of the major part of the jurors." The phrase describes a historical procedural rule under which jury verdicts in civil causes could be rendered by majority agreement rather than requiring unanimity among all twelve jurors. It stands in contrast to the modern common law requirement that jury verdicts be unanimous.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of a significant procedural divide in jury history. Researchers encountering ex dicto majoris partis in older English or early American sources should treat it as a signal that the surrounding text addresses an era or jurisdiction in which the unanimity rule either had not yet hardened or was actively contested. The phrase appears almost exclusively in the context of jury deliberation procedure and is rarely, if ever, used in modern legal writing.
The historical record is uneven. The unanimity requirement became firmly entrenched in English common law by the late medieval period for criminal trials, but the picture is murkier for civil causes. Sources that invoke ex dicto majoris partis are often describing a procedural moment before that consolidation — or are arguing about whether the unanimity rule was as ancient and universal as later commentators assumed. A researcher should not assume that a source citing this phrase is describing the same procedural moment as another; the phrase spans a period of genuine doctrinal flux.
For researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on jury procedure, verdict requirements, or the historical development of deliberation rules, this term functions as a doorway into sources that predate the modern unanimity norm. It also connects to debates in twentieth-century constitutional law over whether unanimity in criminal verdicts is constitutionally required — a question that remained unsettled in American federal courts until relatively recently.
Be alert to jurisdictional and temporal context when this phrase appears. A civil cause in fourteenth-century England, a colonial American proceeding, and a modern state court are operating under materially different frameworks, and the phrase does not distinguish among them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term and provides the essential definition: ex dicto majoris partis juratorum as "according to the verdict of the major part of the jurors." Burrill goes further than the bare translation by noting the procedural mechanism that accompanied majority verdict practice — the separation of the jury into groups, followed by individual examination of each group as to their reasons. This detail is important because it situates the phrase within a specific and now-obsolete procedure, not merely a voting rule. Majority verdict was not simply a matter of counting hands; it involved a structured inquiry into the grounds of disagreement.
Burrill's entry is truncated in available sources, which limits what can be said with confidence about the full scope of his treatment. The phrase does not appear prominently in other standard historical dictionaries of English law, which suggests it was already receding from active use by the time those dictionaries were compiled. Its absence from later dictionaries is itself informative: by the nineteenth century, the unanimity requirement had become so entrenched that the majority-verdict phrase had largely dropped out of practical legal vocabulary and survived mainly as a historical curiosity or a term of art in treatises on jury history.
Modern legal dictionaries do not carry this phrase as an entry, which underscores its status as a term of historical legal scholarship rather than current practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The unanimity requirement for criminal jury verdicts was long assumed to be universal at common law, but it was not constitutionally mandated in all American state criminal proceedings. Several states have permitted non-unanimous jury verdicts in non-capital felony cases, making the historical principle underlying ex dicto majoris partis more than an antiquarian footnote in those jurisdictions. Researchers should consult current state constitutional and statutory provisions when the underlying question — majority versus unanimous verdicts — has practical stakes.