Definition
Ex officio informations are criminal prosecutions filed by the Attorney General (or, in England, the King's/Queen's Counsel) in the name of the Crown, acting in an official capacity without the need for a preceding grand jury indictment or a direction from the court. The proceeding is initiated by the law officer's own authority — ex officio, meaning "by virtue of office" — and filed directly in a superior court. Historically, this procedure allowed the Crown to commence criminal prosecutions, most frequently for seditious libel and other high-profile political offenses, bypassing the ordinary grand jury process entirely.
The information was filed in the Court of King's Bench in England and placed the defendant in the position of having to plead and stand trial without having the charges first screened by a grand jury of peers. This made ex officio informations a particularly powerful — and controversial — instrument of state prosecution.
Common Language
No Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 common definition is applicable here. The phrase "ex officio" carries a general meaning in modern usage (acting by virtue of one's office or position, as in an "ex officio member" of a committee), but "ex officio informations" as a compound legal term has no meaningful life outside the law. The common meaning of "ex officio" does, however, correctly signal the core concept: authority deriving from office rather than from external mandate or permission. A researcher encountering the phrase in ordinary context should not assume the full procedural weight the legal term carries.
Common Confusion
Ex officio informations are sometimes conflated with ordinary criminal informations. The distinction is significant. An ordinary criminal information may be filed by a public prosecutor in a subordinate or statutory role, often with judicial leave required, and is a routine instrument across many jurisdictions. An ex officio information, by contrast, is filed by the senior law officer of the Crown acting on personal official authority, without judicial permission and without a grand jury. The absence of these gatekeeping mechanisms is precisely what made ex officio informations politically contested. Researchers should not treat the two forms as interchangeable when reading historical English materials.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a creature of English legal history and belongs primarily to the period between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its significance in the Law Mind corpus falls into several categories:
First, ex officio informations are central to the history of press freedom and seditious libel law. The Crown's ability to prosecute printers, publishers, and political writers through this mechanism — without grand jury screening — was a live constitutional grievance in both England and the American colonies. Researchers tracing the development of First Amendment doctrine, freedom of the press, or seditious libel will encounter this procedure repeatedly in foundational materials.
Second, the abolition of ex officio informations in England (largely completed by the mid-nineteenth century, with the procedure falling into disuse and eventual statutory reform) marks a turning point in criminal procedure. A source written before versus after this transition will describe the procedure in starkly different terms — one as current practice, the other as historical relic.
Third, American materials largely rejected this procedure from the outset. The grand jury requirement embedded in the Fifth Amendment reflects, in part, a deliberate departure from the Crown's ex officio prosecution power. Researchers reading American sources should note that references to ex officio informations almost always look eastward to English practice; the procedure never took firm root in American courts.
Fourth, confusion between ex officio informations and the broader category of criminal informations (which do survive in various forms in American practice) can distort research into criminal procedure history. The historical sources do not always sharply distinguish between types, requiring careful reading of context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (1883) identifies ex officio informations as those "filed by the attorney-general of his own authority, without any previous direction of the court," distinguishing them from informations filed at the instance of private parties or with judicial leave. The entry correctly situates the procedure in the Court of King's Bench and flags the absence of grand jury process as the defining characteristic.
What Rapalje & Lawrence does not fully develop is the political and constitutional controversy surrounding this procedure — the debates over seditious libel, the Zenger trial in the colonies, the reform movements in England, and the American constitutional response. Researchers relying solely on Rapalje & Lawrence will have the procedural skeleton without the historical flesh. For that fuller context, the historical dictionary entry is best treated as a starting point to be supplemented with treatise and historical sources on English criminal procedure and press law.
Jurisdictional Note
Ex officio informations are an English common law procedure. They were not adopted as standard practice in American courts and are effectively absent from American criminal procedure after the Founding. Researchers working in American materials will encounter the term descriptively — in contrast to American practice — rather than as an operative procedural form.