Definition
A fast bill of exceptions is a procedural mechanism, historically recognized in Georgia practice, by which a party could obtain expedited appellate review of certain interlocutory orders — most commonly in injunction cases — by requiring the trial court to certify the bill of exceptions within a compressed timeframe. The accelerated certification was designed to secure a speedy hearing on appeal before the underlying controversy was rendered moot or the practical value of the remedy lost.
Under ordinary Georgia practice, a bill of exceptions was the formal written record of errors complained of at trial, tendered to the court for certification and transmission to the appellate court. The fast bill of exceptions operated under the same structural framework but imposed a shortened deadline — certification within twenty days after the decision — in recognition that certain equitable and interlocutory matters could not wait for the standard appellate timeline.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely a creature of nineteenth-century Georgia procedure and will appear in Georgia appellate reports and practice manuals from that era. Researchers encountering the phrase in primary sources from that period should understand it as a term of art governing timing and jurisdiction, not as a distinct type of exception or a comment on the merits of the underlying claim.
The practical trap for the modern researcher is this: the fast bill of exceptions is procedurally obsolete. Georgia abolished the bill of exceptions as its mechanism of appellate review, replacing it with the notice of appeal system under the Georgia Civil Practice Act of 1966. References to fast bills of exceptions in modern secondary sources are therefore almost exclusively historical. Do not assume the procedural rules described in nineteenth-century Georgia reporters or practice guides have any continuing operative force.
A second trap is the overlap with federal equity practice. Researchers working on pre-merger federal equity cases (pre-1938, when the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure merged law and equity) may encounter analogous mechanisms for expedited review of injunctions, but those are distinct from the Georgia fast bill and governed by different rules. Do not conflate the two.
The citation in Bouvier's — 66 Ga. 353 — places the term squarely in the Georgia Supreme Court reporter series. Researchers should treat that reporter volume as the primary source for the procedural requirements the Georgia courts actually applied.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive historical dictionary definition located for this term, and it is brief: a fast bill of exceptions is one available in Georgia in injunction cases and similar proceedings, certified within twenty days of the decision to secure speedy hearing. Bouvier cites 66 Ga. 353 as authority.
The entry is characteristically sparse even by Bouvier's standards, reflecting that the fast bill of exceptions was a localized procedural rule rather than a term of general common-law significance. No entry for this term appears in standard general dictionaries of the period, confirming it was Georgia-specific practice rather than a widely adopted procedure. Researchers should not expect to find substantive discussion in Black's or other contemporaneous legal dictionaries outside Georgia-specific materials.
What Bouvier does not address — and what researchers should seek in primary sources — is the full scope of case types beyond injunctions that qualified for the fast bill procedure, the consequences of missing the twenty-day certification window, and the interaction between this mechanism and the Georgia Supreme Court's own rules governing docketing and argument scheduling.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to Georgia appellate practice and has no recognized equivalent under that name in other state systems or in federal practice. The procedure is abolished in Georgia. Researchers working outside Georgia historical materials will not encounter it in operative form.