Definition
An ex officio information is a criminal information filed by the Attorney General acting in his official capacity on behalf of the Crown, without requiring leave of court or a private relator. It was a prosecutorial instrument used in the Court of Queen's (or King's) Bench in English law to initiate criminal proceedings for offenses considered to directly threaten the government, public order, or the administration of justice — bypassing the grand jury indictment process entirely.
The mechanism operated by virtue of the Attorney General's inherent authority as the Crown's chief law officer. Because the filing derived from official duty rather than private complaint, it carried exceptional force: unlike a criminal information filed at the relation of a private party, an ex officio information required no judicial permission to file and imposed immediate obligations on the defendant to appear and answer.
Common Confusion
Ex officio information vs. criminal information on relation: These are distinct instruments sometimes conflated in historical sources. A criminal information on the relation of a private party (an "information on the Crown side" filed at a relator's instance) required leave of court and was subject to procedural screening. An ex officio information required no such leave — it was filed as a matter of sovereign right exercised by the Attorney General alone. The distinction matters because defenses available against one were not always available against the other, and the political stakes of each differed markedly.
Ex officio information vs. indictment: Both initiated Crown criminal proceedings, but the indictment passed through a grand jury and represented presentment by the community. The ex officio information bypassed the grand jury entirely, making it simultaneously faster and more politically controversial. Critics of the instrument in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries objected precisely to the absence of grand jury review.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English legal history, press law, seditious libel, or comparative constitutional history will encounter this term in contexts where its political valence is as important as its procedural meaning.
The ex officio information was the preferred vehicle for prosecutions of seditious libel, blasphemous libel, and political speech offenses in England from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Its use by Attorneys General against printers, journalists, and pamphleteers made it a flashpoint in debates over press freedom and jury rights. The Fox Libel Act 1792 addressed one dimension of this tension by confirming the jury's right to return a general verdict on libel, but the ex officio information as a filing mechanism survived that reform.
Corpus researchers should note several traps. First, historical sources frequently use "information" to cover both the ex officio and relator-initiated varieties without distinguishing them; the presence or absence of "ex officio" is the operative signal. Second, American sources occasionally reference the instrument in early republic debates about whether Attorneys General inherited any analogous common law power — they generally did not, and federal criminal prosecution moved firmly toward indictment. Third, the term appears in Indian and colonial legal history, where English procedural forms were transplanted into different constitutional environments; the instrument's scope and legitimacy in colonial courts was contested differently than in England proper.
For researchers working in press history or sedition law, cross-referencing ex officio information proceedings against the careers of specific Attorneys General — particularly those of the 1790s and early 1800s — is essential, as the instrument's use was highly discretionary and politically charged.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in close agreement on the core definition: both identify the ex officio information as an English law instrument, filed by the Attorney General on behalf of the Crown, in the Court of Queen's Bench, for offenses more immediately affecting the government. Bouvier adds the useful clarificatory note that it is to be distinguished from informations in which the Crown appears as nominal prosecutor — a distinction that points directly at the relator-information confusion addressed above.
Both sources treat the instrument as a term of received English law rather than a living American doctrine, which is itself informative: by the time these dictionaries were compiled in their principal editions, the ex officio information had no significant American counterpart. Neither source dwells on the political controversy that surrounded the instrument's historical use, which historical dictionaries of this period rarely do. Stephen's Commentaries (cited in Bouvier) provides more analytical depth on the procedural mechanics and is worth consulting for the institutional framework.
What the historical dictionaries do not capture: the extent to which the ex officio information was an instrument of political prosecution; the role of reform movements in curtailing its use; and any American reception history. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as procedural starting points, not as accounts of the instrument's contested legal and political career.
Jurisdictional Note
The ex officio information was a distinctively English common law instrument rooted in the Crown's prerogative and the Attorney General's office as held under English constitutional arrangements. It was not transplanted into American federal practice, where the Fifth Amendment's grand jury clause foreclosed analogous non-indictment prosecution in federal criminal cases. Some colonial and post-colonial jurisdictions within the British Empire used adapted forms, but the instrument's scope varied significantly depending on whether local constitutional documents incorporated English procedural guarantees.