KEYS OF COURT

Definition

In old Scots law, certain officers of the court. The term is an English rendering of the Latin phrase claves curiae, meaning literally "keys of the court." These officers held a role connected to the administration or custody functions of a court, though the precise duties varied by court and period. The term appears almost exclusively in historical Scots legal materials and has no modern counterpart in practice.

Why It Matters in Research

This term is a navigational dead end in English-language sources unless the researcher follows it immediately to CLAVES CURIAE, the Latin form under which substantive content appears in historical dictionaries and Scots legal treatises. Both Black's editions and Burrill treat "Keys of Court" as a pure cross-reference with no independent exposition. Researchers encountering this term in transcribed Scots legal records, older institutional writings, or translated court documents should treat the English form as a translation artifact. Primary sources in Scots law almost certainly use the Latin. If you are searching a corpus for this concept, search claves curiae first; the English form may appear only in glossaries or marginal translations. The term carries no relevance to modern court administration, court clerks, or any contemporary officer role. Do not map it onto modern analogues without specific historical support.

Historical Dictionary Support

All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill — are in complete agreement: the term designates certain officers of courts in old Scots law, and all three immediately redirect to the Latin form without further elaboration. No source provides a description of the officers' specific duties, the courts in which they functioned, the period of their operation, or the authority from which the characterization derives. This uniform brevity is itself informative. The term was apparently recorded in the English legal dictionary tradition as a courtesy translation of claves curiae, not because it appeared with frequency in English or Anglo-Scots legal writing, but to ensure a researcher who encountered the English gloss in a secondary source could locate the concept. The dictionaries' silence on substance signals that the real content lies elsewhere — in Scots institutional writers and in the Latin entry. Burrill's entry is notable for immediately appending the entirely unrelated entry for KIDDLE (a dam or weir in a river used for catching fish, citing Magna Carta c. 24 and Coke's Institutes), which is an artifact of alphabetical arrangement in the print edition and has no substantive connection to Keys of Court.

Related Terms