Definition
A Latin adverb used in old English legal practice meaning "again" or "a second time." The term appeared in procedural and pleading contexts to indicate that an act, step, or process was being repeated or performed anew — a second iteration of something already done or previously attempted.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *iterato* in historical legal records, pleading rolls, or early common law texts should treat it as a procedural marker signaling repetition of a prior act. Its significance lies almost entirely in context: what was being done *again* matters far more than the word itself. Because the term appears in Bracton and Fleta — two foundational texts of 13th-century English common law — it surfaces most frequently in scholarship concerning early common law procedure, the forms of action, and the mechanics of medieval pleading.
The term has no meaningful modern legal usage. It does not appear in contemporary American or English statutory codes, and its absence from later legal dictionaries (including Black's Law) reflects its confinement to an archaic procedural vocabulary that fell away as common law practice was systematized and eventually codified. Researchers working in post-17th-century sources will not encounter it; it is a term of the Year Books and the Bracton era.
One navigational trap: because *iterato* is a short, common Latin adverb, it can be mistaken for marginal annotation or scribal shorthand rather than a term of art. In context, it is neither — it is operative procedural language indicating the repetition of a formal step.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the indexed shelf sources, defining *iterato* as "again; a second time" and classifying it as belonging to "old practice." The references to Bracton (fol. 74) and Fleta (lib. 2, c. 65, § 12) are the primary anchors for the term's usage. Burrill offers no elaboration beyond these citations, which is itself informative: the term carried no contested meaning, no doctrinal weight, and no interpretive complexity. It was functional Latin, not a term of legal art requiring extensive unpacking.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus indexes this term independently. That silence is consistent with its narrow usage — a procedural adverb rather than a legal concept.