Definition
Fieri feci (Latin: "I have caused to be made") is the formal return made by a sheriff or other enforcement officer to a writ of fieri facias, reporting that the officer has collected all or part of the monetary judgment directed to be levied. The phrase names the officer's report back to the court confirming successful execution. In practice, the return was not literally written out as "fieri feci" on the writ itself; the officer instead endorsed the word "Satisfied" on the writ to indicate full or partial collection. The term fieri feci thus functions as the doctrinal name for this category of return, distinguishing a return of successful collection from a return of nulla bona (nothing found to levy upon).
Common Confusion
Fieri feci and fieri facias are routinely conflated. Fieri facias is the writ — the court's command directing the sheriff to levy on a debtor's goods. Fieri feci is the return — the sheriff's report that he carried out (or partially carried out) that command. The two terms share a root and appear together in enforcement-of-judgment contexts, but they occupy opposite ends of the same procedural transaction.
A second confusion: the appended maxim fieri non debet, sed factum valet appears immediately after the fieri feci entry in some editions of Black's due to alphabetical sequencing. The maxim is doctrinally unrelated to the return procedure and should not be read as a gloss on fieri feci.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter fieri feci almost exclusively in older common law materials — English practice manuals, early American treatises, and pre-twentieth-century case reports dealing with execution of judgments. The term is procedural shorthand embedded in writ practice that largely disappeared as modern civil procedure codes replaced Latin return terminology.
The critical navigational point: in historical sources, "fieri feci" names the return, not the writ. The writ itself is fieri facias (often abbreviated fi. fa.). Conflating the two is the most common research error. A case discussing the "fieri feci return" is discussing what happened after the writ was executed, not the issuance or form of the writ itself.
The endorsed word "Satisfied" on the physical writ was the operative legal act. Fieri feci as a phrase appears primarily in treatises and legal dictionaries explaining the system, not in the filed documents themselves. Researchers reading court records from this period will rarely see the Latin phrase in the primary source; they will see "Satisfied" or a partial-satisfaction notation. The connection between the endorsed writ and the doctrinal term fieri feci must be bridged using secondary sources.
For corpus researchers tracing enforcement of money judgments across jurisdictions and eras, fieri feci anchors to a specific procedural moment: the officer's return confirming levy. Materials immediately surrounding this term will address sheriffs' duties, partial levy situations, accounting to judgment creditors, and the legal consequences of a "satisfied" return versus an unsatisfied one. The companion maxim sometimes appended in historical sources — fieri non debet, sed factum valet ("it ought not to be done, but if done it is valid") — appears in some dictionary entries following fieri feci and is an unrelated legal maxim; its proximity in alphabetical listings has caused occasional misattribution.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in close agreement on every substantive point: the Latin translation, the definition as a sheriff's return to a writ of fieri facias, and the reference to 2 Tidd's Practice at page 1018 as the leading authority. This uniformity reflects that the term was well-settled and narrow — there was no doctrinal dispute about what fieri feci meant, only the procedural machinery it described.
Black's (both editions) adds the clarification that the actual return was expressed by the word "Satisfied" endorsed on the writ — a practical detail Burrill omits. This is the more useful formulation for researchers reading primary sources, since the Latin phrase itself will not appear on the writ. Neither Black's nor Burrill's expands on what partial collection meant for subsequent enforcement options (such as alias writs), leaving that analysis to the procedural treatises they cite.
The reference to Tidd's Practice is the entry point for deeper research into English common law execution procedure. American courts and treatise writers drew heavily on Tidd in the early national period, making this citation a reliable bridge between English and early American practice materials.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Execution of Judgments; Fieri Facias; Sheriffs and Ministerial Officers