Definition
A formal pleading formula used in common law civil procedure, by which a defendant, through counsel, signified that the defence entered was complete and unqualified. The phrase appeared as a set recitation at the opening of a plea, typically rendered: "And the said C. D., by E. F. his attorney, comes and defends the force (or wrong) and injury when and where it shall behoove him, and the damages, and whatsoever else he ought to defend, and says . . ." The full defence formula was a signal that the defendant was putting the plaintiff to strict proof and reserving all available defences — as opposed to a half defence, which was a more limited appearance that conceded certain procedural ground.
Common Confusion
FULL DEFENCE vs. HALF DEFENCE: The distinction between full defence and half defence was procedurally significant in common law pleading but is unfamiliar to modern practitioners. A full defence was entered when the defendant intended to contest the action on its merits. A half defence — "defends the force and injury when and where it shall behoove him, and says" — was entered in certain actions where the defendant did not intend to contest the merits but appeared only to protect against default. Conflating the two in historical pleadings can lead a researcher to misread a defendant's strategic posture in a pre-reform era case.
FULL DEFENCE vs. GENERAL DENIAL: Modern readers sometimes treat full defence as equivalent to a general denial. It was not. Full defence was a formal threshold recitation — a ritualized entry point into the plea — not itself a substantive denial of the plaintiff's allegations. The actual denial or avoidance followed the formula.
Why It Matters in Research
Full defence is a term almost exclusively confined to pre-Judicature Act English pleading practice and its American counterparts prior to the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Researchers working in common law records before roughly 1850 will encounter the phrase routinely; those working in post-reform materials will find it absent or reduced to historical reference.
The principal research trap is reading a full defence recitation as substantive content. It was not. It was form. The meaning of a plea lay in what followed the formula, not in the formula itself. A defendant entering full defence had not yet said anything about the merits.
A secondary trap involves jurisdiction and date. American states adopted procedural reform codes on different timelines. New York's Field Code (1848) was early; other states lagged by decades. A researcher reading South Carolina or federal equity pleadings from the 1870s may still encounter full defence language that had already disappeared from New York practice a generation earlier.
Researchers should also note that Bouvier simply redirects to his general DEFENCE entry — a sign that even by Bouvier's era the term was understood as a technical pleading artifact rather than a substantive legal concept requiring independent treatment.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence and Burrill's are in close agreement on the substance: full defence is the formula of defence stated at length and without abbreviation, as distinguished from the half defence. Burrill's is the more useful source, providing the full recitation text and citing Stephen's Pleading (American edition, 1824) as authority — a reliable reference for the classical common law pleading system. Rapalje & Lawrence provide the same core definition but the entry as it appears in the corpus is truncated, running immediately into an adjacent entry on Full Faith and Credit; researchers should treat that adjacency as an artifact of alphabetical sequencing, not substantive connection.
Bouvier's cross-reference to DEFENCE is editorially honest but offers no independent guidance on the full/half distinction, which is precisely where the analytical content lies. Historical dictionaries generally do not flag the degree to which full defence had become a mere formality even within the classical pleading system — Stephen's Pleading itself notes that the formula was often entered mechanically, and courts did not scrutinize its precise wording unless the distinction between full and half defence was directly at issue.
What the historical sources collectively omit: any discussion of what happened when counsel inadvertently entered a half defence where a full defence was required, or vice versa. Case law on that point exists but is not surfaced in the dictionary literature.
Jurisdictional Note
Full defence as a formal pleading requirement was a feature of English common law practice and those American jurisdictions that followed it closely before code pleading reform. It was never a feature of equity pleading, which used different entry formulas. After the adoption of code pleading in a given jurisdiction, the term retained historical relevance only.