Definition
Latin: "a speedy remedy." A term of art drawn from medieval English statutory language, referring to a legal remedy designed to resolve disputes more quickly than the ordinary or previously available forms of action. The phrase is historically associated with the writ of assize, which the Statute of Westminster II (13 Edw. I, c. 24, 1285) characterized as a festinum remedium in contrast to the slower, more cumbersome common law actions it was meant to displace. The term does not denote a freestanding legal doctrine but rather a descriptive label applied to procedural mechanisms that Parliament or courts have accelerated in the interest of prompt justice.
Common Confusion
Festinum remedium is sometimes loosely invoked in secondary literature as though it were a general equitable principle commanding courts to act swiftly whenever delay would cause harm. That reading overreaches the historical record. The phrase originated as a statutory characterization of one specific writ — the writ of assize — and its broader use as a jurisprudential maxim is largely rhetorical rather than doctrinal. Researchers should distinguish between the term's precise historical meaning (a parliamentary description of the assize procedure) and its looser modern invocation as a shorthand for the general preference for expeditious remedies.
Why It Matters in Research
This term functions primarily as a window into medieval English procedural reform rather than as an active legal doctrine in modern practice. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical and comparative contexts — treatises on common law procedure, histories of the English writ system, and scholarship on the Statutes of Westminster.
Several research traps apply. First, the phrase appears in Blackstone's Commentaries (3 Bl. Com. 184), where it is used to explain the utility of the assize writs — making Blackstone the most accessible secondary source in Law Mind for contextualizing the term. Second, Burrill's citation to Lord Ellenborough in 15 East 594 is the only English case reference across the historical dictionaries, and researchers pursuing judicial use of the phrase in reported decisions should begin there rather than assuming broader case law exists. Third, the term will not appear in American statutory or constitutional sources in any operative sense; its presence in American legal dictionaries is entirely backward-looking toward English legal history.
Corpus researchers connecting feudal land law, real actions, or the history of summary and expedited proceedings will find festinum remedium useful as a connective concept — linking the older dilatory real actions (such as the writ of right) to the faster assize procedures that gradually displaced them, and ultimately to the still faster remedies introduced by later procedural reforms.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's — are in full agreement on the core definition: festinum remedium means "a speedy remedy" and derives specifically from the Statute of Westminster II's characterization of the writ of assize. There is no divergence of substance among them.
Burrill's entry is the most useful of the three. It adds the Blackstone reference (3 Bl. Com. 184) and the Lord Ellenborough citation that Black's omits entirely, making Burrill's the richer starting point for a researcher tracing the phrase into primary sources. Black's entries (both editions are nearly identical, differing only in a minor typographical variant in the Latin marker) offer no additional context beyond the statutory hook.
What the historical dictionaries collectively leave underdeveloped is any explanation of why the writ of assize was considered fast by medieval standards — that is, what "dilatory" meant in the procedural context of 13th-century land disputes. For that background, the Blackstone reference Burrill supplies is essential.
Jurisdictional Note
Festinum remedium has no operative doctrinal life in American or Commonwealth jurisdictions as a rule of law. It survives only as a historical descriptor in legal scholarship, treatises on English legal history, and occasional judicial rhetoric invoking the general principle that courts should not allow procedural delay to defeat substantive rights.