Definition
Matters and proceedings in bank refers to judicial business conducted before the full court — all judges sitting together — as distinguished from matters heard by a single judge sitting alone or in chambers. In the context of bankruptcy law under the United States Constitution, the phrase identifies which categories of bankruptcy business must be, or properly may be, conducted before the court as a whole, rather than delegated to a single judicial officer or decided in a more limited forum.
The phrase operates as a procedural descriptor rather than a substantive legal standard. It answers the question of how and before whom certain judicial acts must occur, not what the law requires on the merits.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical sources should be alert to two distinct but related uses: (1) its general procedural meaning in any court that historically distinguished "bank" business from chambers or single-judge business, and (2) its specific appearance in nineteenth-century bankruptcy jurisprudence, where courts wrestled with the constitutional and statutory boundaries of federal bankruptcy jurisdiction.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry, though fragmentary in the surviving source text, connects this phrase directly to bankruptcy proceedings under the United States Constitution and cites 72 N.Y. 159 at page 167 — a New York Court of Appeals decision. That citation is notable: a New York state court decision appearing in a discussion of federal constitutional bankruptcy matters suggests the phrase was doing work in defining the jurisdictional or procedural scope of bankruptcy courts in ways that implicated both federal and state authority. Researchers tracing the historical development of bankruptcy procedure should examine whether the phrase was used to distinguish matters requiring plenary court action from those that could be referred to a single commissioner or register — a live question throughout the nineteenth century under successive federal bankruptcy acts.
In historical legal research generally, "in bank" (or "en banc") terminology marks a divide in court structure that was more formally observed in earlier periods. Many older reporters and digests index cases differently depending on whether they were decided in bank or at nisi prius. A researcher who fails to recognize this distinction may misread the procedural posture of a historical decision or overlook a more authoritative full-court ruling that sits alongside a single-judge opinion on the same question.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treat this phrase in connection with bankruptcy under the United States Constitution, anchoring it in a specific doctrinal context rather than offering a general procedural definition. The surviving entry text is fragmentary, but the reference to 72 N.Y. 159 at 167 is substantive: it points researchers toward a concrete application of the phrase rather than leaving it as pure abstraction.
What historical dictionaries of this period typically do not address is the procedural machinery behind the phrase — specifically, how nineteenth-century federal bankruptcy courts allocated business between the full court and subordinate officers. That gap means researchers relying solely on dictionary definitions will miss the operational significance of the distinction. Treatises on federal bankruptcy practice from the same era, and the legislative history of the Bankruptcy Acts of 1841, 1867, and 1898, provide the fuller picture.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase carries different weight depending on court structure. In courts organized with multiple judges where "bank" sittings were a formal procedural category, the designation had binding significance. In federal bankruptcy courts, the allocation of matters between the district judge sitting in bank and subordinate registers or referees was a recurring source of procedural dispute throughout the nineteenth century.