Definition
In pleading and practice, impertinence is the inclusion in a pleading, bill, answer, or other court document of matter that does not properly belong to the proceeding or is not relevant to the issue before the court at that stage of the litigation. The term overlaps substantially with irrelevancy and is most at home in equity pleading, where courts exercised close supervisory control over the contents of written submissions.
Two related but distinct uses appear in historical sources:
1. Pleading impertinence. Matter introduced into a bill, answer, or other pleading that is not properly before the court for decision. The court may order such matter stricken, but courts have historically applied this remedy cautiously: if impertinent matter is erroneously struck, the error may be irremediable, whereas matter wrongly left in can be accounted for in taxing costs.
2. Evidentiary impertinence. A question put to a witness, or evidence sought to be elicited, that does not bear on any issue properly before the court. In this context the term is largely synonymous with irrelevance or improper questioning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Insolence; impudence; rudeness; or, in a secondary sense, lack of pertinence or irrelevance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Conduct or language unbecoming the person, the society, or the circumstances; rudeness; incivility." Webster also recognized the older sense of simple irrelevance — "absence of pertinence" — but placed the behavioral meaning first.
The gap here is significant for researchers. In ordinary modern English, impertinence almost always means rudeness or insolence. In legal sources, it almost always means irrelevance or matter out of place in a proceeding. A researcher encountering the word in a nineteenth-century pleading treatise or equity opinion must resist the colloquial reading entirely; the legal term carries no connotation of disrespect and is purely a technical descriptor of misplaced or extraneous pleading content.
Common Confusion
Impertinence and scandalousness are related but distinct grounds for striking pleading matter in equity. Impertinent matter is simply irrelevant — it does not belong to the proceeding. Scandalous matter is matter that is both irrelevant and charges some person with crime, fraud, or other misconduct in a way that is reproachful or degrading. All scandalous pleading matter is impertinent, but not all impertinent matter is scandalous. Historical sources sometimes use the terms interchangeably or in tandem, which can obscure the distinction.
Impertinence should also be distinguished from surplusage, which typically refers to unnecessary or excessive language that does not change the legal effect of a pleading, rather than matter that affirmatively does not belong.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter impertinence most heavily in equity pleading materials — treatises on chancery practice, bills in equity, and equity court opinions from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The term largely recedes from prominent use after the merger of law and equity under modern procedural codes, where relevance objections and motions to strike perform the same function without the specialized vocabulary.
Two traps await the unwary reader. First, the colloquial meaning (rudeness) and the legal meaning (irrelevance) are so divergent that context alone must guide interpretation; a court describing a pleading as "impertinent" is not commenting on the drafter's manners. Second, the standard for what is impertinent is stage-dependent — matter that would be impertinent at one phase of litigation might be entirely proper at another. Anderson's notes this explicitly, and researchers analyzing equity practice should pay attention to where in the proceeding an impertinence objection was raised.
The cautious remedy rule noted by Anderson's — courts hesitating to strike impertinent matter because erroneously striking it is irremediable — is a useful research hook. It reveals that equity courts treated the motion to strike impertinent matter as a high-stakes procedural step, not a routine housekeeping measure, and explains why the threshold for striking was set higher than one might expect.
In the Law Mind corpus, impertinence appears with some frequency in equity pleading treatises and in chancery court records. Cross-referencing with irrelevancy, scandalousness, and the relevant pleading materials will typically yield the most complete picture.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on the core meaning: impertinence in legal usage means irrelevance or the introduction of extraneous matter into a pleading or proceeding. Black's (both editions) and Burrill define it in nearly identical terms, grounding it in equity pleading and cross-referencing Story's Equity Pleading. Anderson's adds the practical gloss about judicial caution in granting motions to strike, which is absent from the other entries but is consistent with chancery practice doctrine.
Burrill's entry is notable for tracing the term to its Latin roots (in privative + pertinere, to belong to), which illuminates the word's strictly technical character in legal usage — it describes matter that simply does not belong, with no evaluative or moral coloring.
None of the historical dictionaries address the fate of the term after code pleading reforms, and none discuss modern evidentiary usage in depth. Researchers should treat these entries as authoritative for equity and chancery practice but should not expect them to map cleanly onto contemporary procedural or evidentiary doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Impertinence as a formal pleading doctrine is most fully developed in English and American equity jurisprudence. In jurisdictions that adopted the Field Code or later the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the concept survives functionally through motions to strike irrelevant matter, but the word "impertinence" largely disappears from procedural vocabulary. Research in English chancery sources will find the term used more frequently and with greater precision than in American sources of the same period.