Definition
In Roman and civil law, an interlocutory order or pronouncement issued by a judge during the course of proceedings — a ruling on an incidental or preliminary matter that does not finally dispose of the cause. Distinguished from a definitive sentence (sententia), which resolved the merits, an interlocutio was a judicial declaration on procedural or subordinate questions arising mid-proceeding: the admissibility of evidence, the joinder of parties, or a preliminary finding of fact necessary to move the case forward.
In older English legal sources, Burrill's Law Dictionary redirects the term simply to IMPARLANCE — a usage that reflects the influence of the law Latin tradition on early common law pleading vocabulary, where interlocutio was understood to encompass the formal continuances and parleys between parties that imparlance governed.
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Common Confusion
INTERLOCUTIO and IMPARLANCE are not synonymous, though Burrill treats them as equivalents. Imparlance (from Old French emparler, to speak with) was a specific common law procedural device — a time granted to a defendant to deliberate before pleading. Interlocutio in the civil law tradition was broader: any non-final judicial pronouncement. The conflation in Burrill reflects a loose cross-reference practice common to mid-nineteenth-century dictionaries bridging civil and common law vocabularies, not a technical equivalence. A researcher encountering interlocutio in a Roman law, ecclesiastical court, or admiralty context should not assume imparlance doctrine governs.
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Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap here is dictionary-chain collapse. Burrill's single-line entry — directing the reader to Imparlance — risks collapsing the full civil law meaning of interlocutio into the much narrower common law procedural device. Researchers working in:
— **Ecclesiastical or admiralty sources**: Interlocutio appears in its civil law sense. Courts of admiralty and ecclesiastical courts operated under civilian procedure well into the nineteenth century, and their records use interlocutio to denote any intermediate judicial act. Imparlance doctrine is irrelevant in these contexts.
— **Civil law jurisdictions and comparative materials**: Louisiana, Quebec, and sources drawing on the ius commune will use interlocutio (or its vernacular equivalents) to describe interlocutory rulings generally. The modern interlocutory order in Anglo-American law is the functional descendant of the civil law interlocutio, not of imparlance.
— **Early English reports and pleading manuals**: Where Latin law terms appear in common law sources from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, interlocutio may signal a civilian-trained writer and carry the broader meaning.
When tracing the lineage of modern interlocutory appeal doctrine, the civil law interlocutio is the more direct ancestor than imparlance, and researchers should treat them as parallel concepts developed in distinct procedural traditions rather than as interchangeable terms.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary (mid-nineteenth century) is the sole shelf source here, and its entry is almost entirely unhelpful on the civil law substance — it functions as nothing more than a cross-reference pointer. This is one of the instances where the historical dictionaries on the Law Mind shelf reveal a gap rather than fill one.
The civil law meaning of interlocutio is well-attested in civilian sources outside this corpus: Justinian's Digest and later glossators distinguished the interlocutio from the sententia definitiva with precision. The interlocutio could be revised or reversed by the same judge before final sentence, whereas a definitive sentence had greater binding force. This revisability is conceptually important and finds no reflection in the Burrill entry.
What Burrill's redirect does tell us is that by the mid-nineteenth century, American common law practitioners were not expected to engage with the civilian technical meaning — interlocutio had been effectively absorbed into the common law vocabulary under the label imparlance or simply rendered as "interlocutory." The dictionary entry is thus a useful artifact of how civilian terminology was domesticated (and partially lost) in American legal practice.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term carries its civilian technical meaning in Louisiana and in historical ecclesiastical and admiralty court records across common law jurisdictions. In general common law research, interlocutio has no operative modern significance; its function is performed by the phrase interlocutory order or interlocutory ruling.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: INTERLOCUTORY ORDERS; IMPARLANCE; CIVIL LAW PROCEDURE
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