Definition
Fication is an archaic procedural term referring to the inspection of documents held by a party to a legal action or other court proceeding. Where a party has admitted — by pleadings or otherwise — that documents relevant to the matters in dispute are in that party's possession, any other party to the proceeding may give notice requiring production of those documents for inspection.
The term is closely associated with the notice-to-produce mechanism in common law practice: once a party acknowledged possession of relevant materials, opposing counsel could compel their exhibition without resorting to a full equitable bill of discovery.
Common Confusion
Researchers should not confuse fication with general discovery. Modern discovery is a broad pretrial process allowing parties to obtain information regardless of whether the opposing party has acknowledged possession. Fication was narrower: it was an inspection remedy contingent on prior admission of possession, not an independent investigative tool. The distinction matters when evaluating the scope of document exchange in historical litigation and should not be read backward onto pre-twentieth-century proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "fication" in historical pleadings, procedural manuals, or court records should recognize it as a term of art specific to pre-modern common law practice, not a corruption or truncation of another word. It does not appear in modern procedural vocabulary, having been absorbed entirely into the discovery and document-production frameworks of contemporary civil procedure — in federal practice, Rules 26 and 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure now govern what fication addressed in earlier practice.
The term is an index of the older, admission-triggered model of document production, which differed fundamentally from modern broad pretrial discovery. Under the older practice, production rights depended on the opposing party having already acknowledged possession, whether expressly in a pleading or impliedly by conduct. This is a narrower trigger than the modern relevance-based standard, and researchers analyzing historical litigation strategy should account for this constraint when evaluating what documents parties actually exchanged.
Because fication appears embedded in Rapalje & Lawrence's entry alongside "inventiones" (treasure-trove) and "inventor," researchers should be alert to the possibility that their source text reflects a partially corrupted or truncated dictionary entry — the juxtaposition of these unrelated terms suggests a printing or transcription anomaly in the source volume rather than a thematic grouping. Cross-checking against other nineteenth-century procedural dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's early editions) is advisable before relying on the Rapalje & Lawrence entry alone.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the primary historical record for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Their definition is compact: fication denotes inspection of documents, triggered by a party's admission — through pleadings or otherwise — of possession of documents material to the controversy. Any opposing party may then give notice to produce.
The entry is notable for what it omits. It does not specify the procedural vehicle by which production was enforced once notice was given, nor does it address what consequences flowed from non-compliance. Nineteenth-century practitioners would have understood those mechanics from surrounding procedural rules and local court practice, but modern researchers will need to consult contemporary treatises on common law pleading and practice to reconstruct the full procedural picture.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary and Black's Law Dictionary (early editions) do not carry a dedicated entry for "fication" as a standalone term, suggesting it was either regionalized in usage, fell out of standard usage relatively early, or was more commonly encountered as part of a compound procedural phrase. Its absence from those dictionaries makes Rapalje & Lawrence the principal — and essentially sole — lexicographic authority for the term.