Definition
To hold pleas means to hear or try causes — that is, to exercise judicial authority over legal proceedings, including the reception and adjudication of pleadings, arguments, and claims brought before a court. A court or judge that holds pleas possesses the jurisdiction and formal authority to entertain litigation: to receive the parties, hear their contentions, and render judgment.
The phrase is archaic in modern practice but was once a standard term of art describing the core judicial function of a court of record. To say that a court "holds pleas" is to say that it is a proper forum — constituted and empowered to conduct proceedings, not merely a ministerial or administrative body. The term encompasses civil and criminal proceedings alike, though it appears most often in descriptions of courts of general jurisdiction and in the names of historic English and American courts (e.g., the Court of Common Pleas, which held pleas of a civil nature between subjects).
Common Confusion
"Hold pleas" should not be confused with the modern procedural act of a defendant entering a plea (guilty, not guilty, no contest) at arraignment. In contemporary usage, "plea" most often refers to a defendant's formal response to a criminal charge. "Hold pleas," by contrast, describes the court's authority and function — not the defendant's act. The phrase belongs to the vocabulary of jurisdictional description, not to the vocabulary of criminal procedure as practiced today.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter "hold pleas" primarily in two contexts: historical court structure and jurisdictional analysis.
First, the phrase appears in early English and American sources as a marker of a court's legitimate authority. When reading colonial-era statutes, royal charters, or early state constitutions, the grant of power to "hold pleas" signals that the tribunal in question is a full court of record with adjudicatory power — not a justice of the peace or an administrative officer. Missing this distinction leads to errors in understanding the scope of a historical court's authority.
Second, the phrase is embedded in the names and descriptions of the English common-law courts from which American courts descended. The Court of Common Pleas held pleas between common persons (civil suits); the Court of King's (or Queen's) Bench held pleas of the Crown (criminal and supervisory matters). Understanding which court held which pleas is essential for tracing the provenance of procedural rules and jurisdictional doctrines into American law.
Researchers working in early American legal materials — particularly pre-Civil War state court records, colonial charters, and founding-era treatises — will find the phrase used without gloss, as a term any reader was expected to understand. It effectively disappears from active legal drafting by the mid-nineteenth century as American courts adopted more explicit statutory jurisdictional grants.
The Blackstone citation (8 Bl. Comm. 35, 298) that both Black's and Bouvier's supply anchors the term in the foundational English common-law commentary. Researchers tracing a jurisdictional question back through early American practice to its English origins should begin there.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary give identical, terse definitions: "To hear or try causes," with a shared citation to Blackstone's Commentaries. This convergence is unsurprising — both dictionaries drew heavily from the same English common-law substrate, and the phrase was not contested or ambiguous enough to generate divergent treatments.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context for why the phrase mattered: namely, the structural distinction between courts that held pleas (and thus exercised true judicial power) and bodies that did not. For that, researchers must go to Blackstone directly and to the institutional histories of the English common-law courts. Bouvier's broader entries on courts of record and courts of common pleas fill in some of this background, but the "hold pleas" entry itself is treated as self-evident — a reflection of how deeply the phrase was embedded in legal culture at the time of writing.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Arraignment and Entry of Plea (criminal_198) — for the modern procedural context in which "plea" appears today, useful as a contrast to the historical jurisdictional meaning of "hold pleas."
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Plea Bargaining — Law, Practice, and Judicial Oversight (criminal_202) — for further background on the role of pleas in contemporary criminal proceedings.