Definition
Out of superabundance; from surplus or excess. A Latin term of art used in legal pleading and drafting to signal that a particular statement, averration, or clause is included not because it is legally necessary, but as an additional precaution — beyond what the situation strictly requires.
The phrase appears most commonly in two compound forms: *ex superabundanti et ad majorem cautelam* ("out of superabundance and for greater security") and *ad cautelam et ex superabundanti* ("by way of caution and out of superabundance"). Both constructions convey the same practical message: the drafter is including something extra, deliberately and self-consciously, as a belt-and-suspenders measure rather than because the law demands it.
The term is close in meaning and function to *ex abundanti* (out of abundance), which Burrill treats as the parent or companion phrase. The distinction, where one exists at all, is one of degree rather than kind — *ex superabundanti* emphasizes a higher order of superfluity, as the prefix *super-* suggests excess beyond abundance.
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Common Confusion
EX SUPERABUNDANTI vs. EX ABUNDANTI: These phrases are used interchangeably in many historical sources and the difference is largely rhetorical. *Ex abundanti* is the more common form; *ex superabundanti* is an intensified variant. Researchers encountering one should search for both when tracing a document's usage across sources. Neither term should be confused with *ex abundanti cautela* (out of abundant caution), a modern phrase of similar intent that now appears frequently in contract drafting and judicial opinions but carries no specific historical pedigree as a formal term of art.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of formal pleading culture, not a substantive legal concept. When you encounter *ex superabundanti* in a historical document — most often a state trial record, an indictment, a chancery pleading, or a formal deed — it signals that the surrounding language was inserted as precautionary surplusage. That has two practical implications for researchers.
First, surplusage inserted *ex superabundanti* was generally held not to vitiate a pleading if it turned out to be incorrect or irrelevant. Courts applying common-law pleading rules sometimes treated such language as void for surplusage rather than fatal to the instrument. A researcher analyzing whether a historical pleading was demurrable or defective needs to determine whether the challenged language was offered as legally operative or merely as precautionary filler — the *ex superabundanti* label, if present, directly answers that question.
Second, the phrase concentrates in a specific corpus: English state trial records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the Howell's State Trials volumes, which Burrill cites), chancery and common-law pleading manuals of the same era, and conveyancing precedents. It is rare in American legal sources after the mid-nineteenth century, when code pleading reforms (beginning with New York's Field Code of 1848) displaced much of the formal Latin pleading vocabulary. A researcher finding this phrase in an American document after roughly 1850 is likely looking at a learned affectation, a verbatim copy of an English precedent, or a context — such as admiralty or ecclesiastical-style proceedings — where Latin pleading conventions persisted.
The Burrill citations to Howell's State Trials (2 How. St. Trials, 1163 and 1184) anchor the phrase firmly in the high-stakes political trial context of early modern England, where meticulous pleading was both a professional obligation and a defensive weapon for counsel on both sides.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only major historical law dictionary in the Law Mind corpus to treat *ex superabundanti* as a standalone entry, though he handles it briefly and by cross-reference to *ex abundanti*. His definition — "out of superabundance, or superfluity" — is accurate and consistent with usage in the cited sources. He supplies the two compound forms with their English glosses and anchors both to the Howell's State Trials volumes, which is appropriate; the phrase appears in those records precisely because state trials demanded the most elaborate and redundant pleading available to counsel.
What Burrill does not address, and what no standard historical dictionary fully develops, is the doctrinal function of *ex superabundanti* language in pleading — specifically, the surplusage rule and its consequences for demurrer practice. For that analysis a researcher must go beyond the dictionary literature to pleading treatises: Chitty's *Pleading*, Stephen's *Principles of Pleading*, and their American successors provide the substantive framework within which this phrase operated.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs almost entirely to English common-law and chancery practice and to American jurisdictions before code pleading reform. It has no meaningful modern jurisdictional variation because it has effectively passed out of active legal usage. In civil-law jurisdictions the concept of precautionary surplusage exists but is expressed in different terminology.
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