Definition
An archaic term, drawn from old Scots law practice, for an interlocutory decree or decision — that is, a ruling made by a court during the course of proceedings that does not finally dispose of the matter but addresses an intermediate question of procedure, pleading, or substantive right. The term is a variant spelling of INTERLOCUTOR, which remained the standard term in Scots legal practice for any formal judicial ruling issued between the commencement and final determination of a cause.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "interloquitor" in historical sources should treat it as a spelling variant of "interlocutor" rather than a distinct legal concept. The term appears in older Scots practice records and trial reports — Burrill cites the State Trials collection — and is not a term of art in English common law courts, where the functional equivalent was simply an "interlocutory order" or "interlocutory decree." Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century Scottish legal materials should be alert to the variant spellings and the distinct procedural architecture of Scots law, in which the interlocutor served as the formal vehicle for all judicial rulings, both interim and final, and was issued in a structured written form quite unlike the English practice. Cross-referencing under INTERLOCUTOR and INTERLOCUTORY will recover the substantive doctrine; "interloquitor" functions primarily as an index or search variant in corpus research.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary places "interloquitor" firmly in old Scots practice, citing volume 3 of the State Trials (a well-known English and British trial collection) as authority for the usage, and immediately redirects the reader to the related entry for "Interlocutor of relevancy." This redirection is significant: it confirms that Burrill treated interloquitor as a variant form rather than an independent concept, and that the substantive content resides under the interlocutor entry. No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions, not Tomlin's Law Dictionary — carry this spelling as a principal entry, which suggests it had limited circulation outside Scots legal records and the English reports reproducing them. The omission is itself instructive: researchers relying on standard common-law dictionaries alone would not encounter this form at all.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to historical Scots law practice. Modern Scots law continues to use "interlocutor" as the standard term for a court's written order or judgment; "interloquitor" is an archaic spelling not found in contemporary Scottish practice or in any other jurisdiction's current legal vocabulary.