Definition
In old pleading, a term of art meaning bad, defective in law, null, or void — the opposite of "good" or "valid." When a court or party pronounced a plea, writ, declaration, or other pleading "ill," the judgment was that the instrument failed as a matter of law, rendering it a nullity. The term operated as a conclusory legal verdict on the sufficiency of a procedural instrument, not merely a description of its quality.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Unwell in terms of health or physical condition; sick. Also: evil or wicked (of persons or behavior); unpropitious or faulty.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Contrary to good in a physical or moral sense; bad, evil, unfortunate, wicked, or disagreeable.
Editorial note: The ordinary sense of "ill" — sickness, moral wickedness, misfortune — is entirely absent from its legal pleading function. In legal usage, "ill" is a technical verdict on formal sufficiency, not a moral or medical judgment. A researcher encountering "the plea is ill" in an old report is reading a conclusion of law, not a description of character or condition.
Common Confusion
"Ill" in old pleading is sometimes read as synonymous with "bad" in the modern evaluative sense — meaning merely weak, imperfect, or poorly drafted. The historical legal meaning is stronger: "ill" typically signals that the instrument is void and without legal effect, not merely curable by amendment. Burrill's quotations from the reports make this clear — courts pronounced instruments "ill" as a term of art disposing of their legal force entirely. Researchers should also be alert to the compound uses Anderson identifies: "ill-fame" (evil reputation, as in a house of ill fame) and "ill pleading" (pleading defective for want of certainty) represent related but distinct deployments of the prefix.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English and early American common law reports — particularly those predating systematic code pleading — will encounter "ill" as a dispositive judicial pronouncement. It appears in Year Books, Mod. Reports, Show., Leon., and similar reporters as shorthand for a court's ruling that a writ, plea, declaration, or return is legally void. The term essentially disappears from American legal usage after the adoption of code pleading systems in the mid-nineteenth century (triggered by the Field Code of 1848 in New York and similar reforms), making it a marker of the older common law pleading regime.
Two traps for the modern researcher: First, "ill" as a standalone term in old reports may not be indexed under any modern equivalent. Searching for "defective," "void," or "null" in modern finding tools will often miss historical sources using "ill." Second, compound terms — ill-fame, ill pleading, ill president (meaning an ill precedent, not an executive officer) — each carry distinct legal freight and should be traced separately. Burrill's quotation of "an ill president" (3 Leon. 28) is a notable example, where "president" is an archaic spelling of "precedent."
For researchers using the Law Mind corpus, the most active modern survival of "ill" as a legal term is in the criminal law context of "guilty but mentally ill" (GBMI), a twentieth-century verdict form that has nothing to do with old pleading usage. The two uses share only the word.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries converge on the core definition: bad, defective in law, null, naught, the opposite of good or valid. There is no meaningful disagreement among them on the primary meaning.
Burrill provides the most useful documentary support, quoting directly from the reporters: "The plea is ill; the plea is naught" (2 Mod. 68); "It [the declaration] is ill, and shall not be aided" (Com. 44); "Both the return and the writ of mandamus are very ill" (5 Mod. 421). These quotations confirm that "ill" functioned as a formal judicial pronouncement, not merely descriptive commentary.
Anderson adds the dimension that Black's and Burrill underemphasize: "ill" as a prefix in compound legal terms (ill-fame, ill-pleading) derived from the older sense of "evil" or "contrary to rule." Bouvier synthesizes both strands — the direct term and the prefix use — drawing on Anderson for the compound forms.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any treatment of how "ill" transitions out of legal usage. They document the term as live usage without signaling its impending obsolescence, which is expected given their publication dates. No source addresses the modern GBMI usage, which is a twentieth-century legislative coinage unrelated to the common law pleading sense.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Insanity Defense — Guilty But Mentally Ill (GBMI), The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia