Definition
A procedural device in early common law pleading by which a party — in modern practice almost always the defendant — was granted additional time before being required to plead or answer the opposing party's allegations. An imparlance formally continued the action to a later day, suspending the obligation to respond in the meantime.
The original rationale was amicable: the term literally signified leave given to the parties to confer with one another, the hope being that they might settle their dispute without further litigation. In practice, the settlement purpose receded almost entirely, and imparlance became a routine mechanism for securing an extension of time to plead. By the time of the American adoption of common law pleading rules, it functioned primarily as a continuance device rather than a genuine invitation to negotiation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Discussion, especially before some action is taken; conference or debate. Also used in the legal sense of time given to a party to converse with an opponent before pleading.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Mutual discourse; conference. In law, time given to a party to talk with an opponent, originally to effect an amicable adjustment, but in practice a means of obtaining further time to plead.
The ordinary English sense — genuine dialogue aimed at agreement — preserves the original legal rationale better than actual legal practice ever did. By the time imparlance appears in American and late English pleading records, the conversational fiction had collapsed entirely; the term denoted a technical continuance, not a real negotiation. Researchers encountering the word in common writing should not assume the legal procedure it describes involved any actual conference between the parties.
Common Confusion
Imparlance is sometimes loosely equated with a continuance or with leave to plead, but the concepts are technically distinct. A continuance postpones proceedings generally; imparlance was a specific, named procedural step in the formal pleading sequence of common law practice, carrying its own rules about what rights were preserved or waived upon its grant. The distinction matters primarily in historical sources: a defendant who took an imparlance was understood to have acknowledged the court's jurisdiction over the matter, which could foreclose certain jurisdictional defenses. Treating imparlance as a generic synonym for delay obscures this consequence.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Historical common law practice recognized at least two forms:
General imparlance: A simple extension of time to plead, granted without any special reservation of rights. Taking a general imparlance was understood to waive certain preliminary objections, including challenges to the court's jurisdiction over the person.
Special imparlance: An extension granted with an express reservation allowing the defendant to contest jurisdiction or other threshold matters notwithstanding the delay. A defendant who needed more time but wished to preserve a jurisdictional defense would seek a special imparlance rather than a general one.
Why It Matters in Research
Imparlance is an extinct procedural term. It does not appear in modern civil procedure — the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and their state analogs replaced the entire formal pleading sequence in which imparlance operated. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in historical materials: treatises on common law pleading, court records predating the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, and English sources from before the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875.
The key research trap is the jurisdictional-waiver consequence. In a historical proceeding, whether a defendant took a general or special imparlance could determine which defenses remained available. A source that records only that an imparlance was granted, without specifying its type, may be ambiguous on whether jurisdiction was contested.
Corpus researchers should also note that imparlance appears in pleading treatises — Chitty's Pleading being the most prominent — more reliably than in court records, where the term may be abbreviated, latinized, or simply noted as a continuance without the formal label. Cross-referencing procedural history entries in the Law Mind corpus will help establish the timeline of when imparlance language disappears from practice in a given jurisdiction.
The Anderson's Dictionary of Law source available for this entry did not yield a usable definition of imparlance; researchers relying on that dictionary should not infer the term's absence is meaningful.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence agree on the core account: imparlance was a grant of time to the defendant to plead, nominally justified by the settlement rationale but functionally a continuance device. The second edition of Black's is the more complete entry, adding the jurisdictional nuance and the general/special distinction.
Rapalje & Lawrence add a useful practical note — that courts granted imparlances in proper cases to allow time for compromise — suggesting that the settlement fiction, though largely hollow, retained some procedural life in how courts described the device.
Webster's 1913 is noteworthy for capturing the historical arc in a single entry: the term's original meaning (mutual discourse), its legal adoption (time to confer with an opponent), and its practical devolution (mere delay to plead). This makes Webster's 1913, unusually, a reliable guide to the semantic history of this term for researchers who encounter it in both legal and general historical texts.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the waiver consequence of general imparlance — the point that accepting time to plead without reservation could extinguish jurisdictional defenses. Rapalje & Lawrence gesture at this implicitly, but none of the available entries treats it with the prominence it deserves for anyone reading historical pleading records.
Jurisdictional Note
Imparlance was a feature of English common law pleading that carried into American practice in jurisdictions that adopted English common law forms. It was largely eliminated in American jurisdictions that adopted code pleading following the New York Field Code of 1848, and it has no operative role in any jurisdiction governed by modern rules of civil procedure. English practice abolished it with the procedural reforms of the 1870s.