Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "according to the statute" or "by virtue of the statute." Used in legal writing and pleading to indicate that a right, remedy, duty, or action derives from statutory authority rather than from common law, equity, or custom. When a pleader or court invoked ex statuto, the signal was clear: the legal basis at issue was a particular enacted law, not inherited doctrine.
The phrase functions as a citation shorthand in older legal texts, distinguishing statutory grounds from those rooted in the common law (ex lege) or in equitable principles. In practice, it appeared most often in formal pleadings and judicial writing to clarify the source of a cause of action or obligation.
Common Confusion
Ex statuto is occasionally run together with ex lege ("by the law" or "by operation of law") in older texts. The distinction matters: ex lege is broader and encompasses common law as well as statutory law, while ex statuto is narrower, pointing specifically to enacted legislation. A reader encountering ex lege in a historical source should not assume statutory authority; the phrase may refer only to general legal operation. Conversely, ex statuto signals a deliberate tethering to a specific enacted provision.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of navigational rather than substantive significance. When encountered in historical materials — pleadings, Year Books, abridgments, treatises like Fleta or Bracton — ex statuto tells the researcher where to look next: not into common law doctrine, but into the statutory register. That redirect is meaningful in pre-modern English law, where the boundary between statute, custom, and common law was contested and sometimes blurry in practice.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that the phrase carries no independent doctrinal content — it is a marker, not a rule. Its presence in a primary source is a prompt to identify the underlying statute being invoked. In the era when Fleta was composed (late 13th century), English statutory law was thin compared to later periods, so the phrase often pointed to a small set of foundational enactments such as the Statutes of Westminster. Tracking the statute behind the invocation is essential; the phrase alone tells you nothing about what the law actually required.
For researchers in modern materials, ex statuto has largely been replaced by direct citation practice. Encountering it in post-17th century sources would be unusual and might signal an author self-consciously adopting archaic Latin convention. In such cases, treat it as stylistic rather than technically meaningful.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the definition — "according to the statute" — and all three cite the same authority: Fleta, lib. 5, c. 11. Black's first and second editions cite § 1; Burrill cites § 2. The one-section discrepancy is minor and likely reflects variant manuscript or printed editions of Fleta rather than substantive disagreement. None of the three sources expand beyond the bare definition, which is appropriate for a phrase this compact.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is how the phrase functioned within pleading practice — that is, what procedural consequences, if any, flowed from grounding a claim ex statuto versus at common law. For that question, researchers will need to consult treatises on common law pleading directly rather than relying on dictionary coverage.
Notably, the second edition of Black's appends entries for related Latin phrases (ex stipulatu actio, ex tempore) immediately after ex statuto, suggesting the editors treated this section of the dictionary as a cluster of Latin procedural and pleading terms. That context is useful: ex statuto belongs to the vocabulary of formal legal Latin used in classical common law pleading, not to substantive doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses Latin pleading phrases or the statutory/common law distinction in historical pleading practice. The ex parte entries in the Family Law, Constitutional Law, and Intellectual Property encyclopedias share the Latin prefix but are unrelated in meaning or legal context.