Definition
Latin: "informed" or "instructed." In historical common law practice, *informatus* appears principally as a component of the phrase *non sum informatus* ("I am not informed"), a formal declaration made by a defendant's attorney acknowledging that no instructions had been received from the client sufficient to mount an answer or defense. Upon such a declaration, the court would enter judgment by default against the defendant. The term itself carries no independent procedural force; its legal significance derives entirely from its use in the negative construction.
Common Confusion
*Informatus* and *non sum informatus* are sometimes loosely equated, but the distinction is worth preserving. *Informatus* is the participial adjective (informed, instructed); *non sum informatus* is the complete legal formula ("I am not informed/instructed") that constituted the operative declaration in practice. Citing or quoting *informatus* alone, outside the full phrase, strips the term of its procedural content.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *informatus* in historical pleading records, court minutes, or early American and English reports will almost always find it embedded in the phrase *non sum informatus*. The term does not appear as a standalone plea or motion. Its importance is procedural and historical: it marks the formal mechanism by which a defendant's attorney disclaimed authority to act, triggering a default judgment without the court needing to find the defendant in contempt or pursue compulsory process.
This matters for two research situations. First, when working with early American court records—particularly those from state courts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—entries recording a default may abbreviate or translate the attorney's declaration without preserving the Latin. Researchers should recognize that a notation indicating an attorney had "no instructions" or offered "no defense" likely reflects this same procedural act. Second, the phrase distinguishes a default arising from an attorney's lack of instructions from a default arising from a defendant's outright failure to appear. The distinction can bear on questions of whether the default was subsequently set aside, as courts sometimes treated the two categories differently.
The term's presence in the corpus is confined almost entirely to pre-twentieth-century materials. Modern default judgment procedure has entirely displaced the formality of a declared *non sum informatus*, replacing it with ministerial mechanisms triggered by a party's failure to plead within a prescribed time. Researchers should not expect to find the phrase operative in any modern procedural context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Anderson and Burrill treat *informatus* as a Latin-origin term requiring no elaboration beyond its translation and its connection to *non sum informatus*. Anderson's entry provides the more useful framing, identifying the judgment that results—default—and the precise condition triggering it: the attorney's declaration of having no instruction to answer or defend. Burrill's entry is purely referential, directing the reader to the compound phrase rather than treating the root word independently. Neither source situates the term within a broader discussion of default judgment doctrine or attorney authority, and neither traces the phrase's English or American procedural history.
Neither dictionary addresses what happened after such a judgment was entered—whether and on what terms a defendant could seek relief—nor do they distinguish between the attorney's lack of instructions and a voluntary abandonment of the defense. For those questions, researchers should look to period treatises on common law pleading and practice rather than to dictionary entries.