Definition
Mittance is an archaic legal term denoting the act of sending or remitting a cause — that is, the procedural act by which an appellate or superior court transmits a case back to an inferior court for further proceedings consistent with the appellate decision. The term is closely associated with the function of remittitur in its older, procedural sense: the formal dispatch of a matter downward through the judicial hierarchy after an appellate ruling.
In its narrowest technical use, mittance describes the mechanical act of transmission itself — the sending of the record, mandate, or cause — rather than the substantive decision that occasions the sending. It should be distinguished from the decision to reverse or vary, which precedes it, and from the subsequent proceedings in the lower court, which follow from it.
Common Confusion
Mittance is easily conflated with remittitur, which in modern American practice has come to mean almost exclusively a trial court's reduction of an excessive jury verdict as a condition of denying a new trial motion. That meaning is a late development. In the historical period when mittance appears in legal literature, remittitur more commonly meant precisely what mittance means: the sending back of a cause to an inferior tribunal. Researchers encountering mittance in older sources should not read modern remittitur doctrine backward into it. The terms overlap historically but have diverged sharply in contemporary usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Mittance is a term of very limited circulation, appearing in older Anglo-American procedural literature and in dictionaries of the Rapalje & Lawrence generation. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in modern opinions or statutes. Its primary research value is interpretive: when found in nineteenth-century appellate procedure materials, equity practice treatises, or early American procedural codes, it signals a discussion of the mechanics by which superior courts returned causes to inferior courts — a process that had genuine structural importance in an era when appellate courts often lacked independent execution machinery.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry situates mittance squarely in the context of appellate remand mechanics, noting that appellate courts sitting only to resolve questions of law lack the machinery to carry their decisions into effect and must therefore remit — send — the cause downward. This framing is essential context. A researcher reading nineteenth-century equity opinions discussing the "remitting" of a cause, or the "mittance" of a record, should understand these as references to the same procedural act.
There is a secondary trap in historical research: the term appears in close proximity to discussions of equitable injuries, equitable remedies, and mechanic's liens in the Rapalje & Lawrence source fragment. This proximity is incidental — mittance is a procedural term, not a substantive one, and its appearance alongside equity doctrine reflects the encyclopedic organization of the source rather than any substantive connection between mittance and those doctrines.
Researchers working with New York appellate practice of the mid-to-late nineteenth century (the Rapalje & Lawrence citation to 22 N.Y. 67, 87 and the reference to 342 suggest this jurisdiction and period) should be alert to the possibility that mittance appears in procedural rules or court practice guides that predate modern codified appellate procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the primary historical dictionary source for this term, and the entry is fragmentary — it appears embedded in a discussion of the remitting of causes by appellate courts rather than as a standalone headword definition. The core proposition the entry supports is procedural: appellate courts that sit only to resolve legal questions and lack independent execution machinery must remit the cause to an inferior court to carry the decision into effect.
The historical dictionaries do not offer competing definitions of mittance, nor do they develop the term beyond this procedural function. This is itself informative: mittance was not a term of art with contested meaning or jurisdictional variation. It was a descriptive procedural label for an uncontroversial act. Its absence from most modern legal dictionaries confirms that the term did not survive the consolidation of appellate procedure into modern codified rules, where the concept it described is now captured by "remand" and, in a narrower sense, "mandate."
No treatise or case citation to a real, verifiable document supports an expanded definition beyond what Rapalje & Lawrence and the procedural history of remand doctrine provide. No citations have been fabricated to supplement the thin historical record.
Jurisdictional Note
The Rapalje & Lawrence source material reflects New York appellate practice of the nineteenth century. Whether mittance appeared as a term of art in other American jurisdictions or in English practice with identical meaning is not established by available sources. Researchers working outside New York or outside the nineteenth century should treat the term as a historical artifact rather than a term with traceable modern jurisdictional variation.