Definition
A general imparlance is a procedural device in common law pleading by which a defendant was granted time — an adjournment — to prepare and file a pleading, without reserving any right to raise preliminary objections. By accepting a general imparlance, the defendant implicitly waived exceptions to the court's jurisdiction over the person, to defects in the writ, and to other preliminary matters. The defendant could still contest the merits of the plaintiff's claim, but the broad, unqualified nature of the grant foreclosed certain threshold defenses that a more limited form of imparlance would have preserved.
Common Confusion
General imparlance is one of three recognized forms of imparlance at common law — general, special, and imparlance with a saving clause — and the distinctions among them are consequential. A special imparlance, or an imparlance with a saving clause, preserved the defendant's right to plead to the jurisdiction or to object to defects in process. A general imparlance preserved no such rights. Researchers encountering "imparlance" in historical pleadings without a qualifying modifier should treat it with caution: the term alone does not signal which rights were or were not preserved, and the form actually granted controlled the defendant's available defenses going forward.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Three forms of imparlance were recognized at common law:
— GENERAL IMPARLANCE: An unqualified grant of time to plead. No exceptions reserved. Defendant waives all preliminary objections to jurisdiction, process, and the writ itself.
— SPECIAL IMPARLANCE: Time granted with a reservation of the right to plead to the jurisdiction of the court or to the process.
— IMPARLANCE WITH A SAVING CLAUSE: Time granted with a broader reservation, preserving the right to raise all manner of exceptions, including those going to the writ and the form of the action.
Why It Matters in Research
General imparlance belongs to a procedural world that has been almost entirely displaced by modern civil procedure codes — first by the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and later by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) and their state counterparts. Researchers will encounter the term almost exclusively in pre-code case law, pleading treatises, and early American and English court records. Its practical importance in historical research lies in two areas.
First, when reading old plea rolls or reported cases, identifying whether a defendant took a general or a limited imparlance explains why certain defenses were or were not available at subsequent stages of the litigation. A defendant who had accepted a general imparlance and then attempted to plead to the jurisdiction would be met with the objection that the imparlance waived that right — a result that could be outcome-determinative.
Second, the concept connects to the broader pre-code doctrine of waivers through pleading sequence. Historical pleading was highly sequential and formalized; steps taken early in the process had binding downstream consequences. General imparlance is one of the clearest illustrations of that principle and is therefore a useful entry point for understanding how common law pleading actually functioned as a system.
Researchers working in Law Mind's corpus of early American and English legal materials should note that imparlance terminology appears across a wide range of sources — pleading manuals, treatises, and reported cases — but is rarely explained in the documents themselves, because practitioners of the era were expected to know the distinctions. Contextual inference is often required.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in precise agreement on the definition: a general imparlance is one granted upon a prayer in which the defendant reserves to himself no exceptions. The language is nearly identical across both sources, suggesting this was a settled and uncontroversial formulation by the time both dictionaries reached their major editions. Neither source provides meaningful elaboration beyond this core statement, and neither situates the term within a broader account of how imparlance functioned procedurally or what consequences followed from taking one form versus another. Researchers seeking substantive procedural context will need to turn to the classical pleading treatises — Chitty's Treatise on Pleading, Stephen's Principles of Pleading, or Gould's Treatise on the Principles of Pleading — where the doctrine is treated at length.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Pleading (Common Law); Writ Practice; Waiver in Pleading.