Definition
A Latin maxim meaning "for the purpose of delaying payment" or "for the sake of postponing performance." The phrase describes an act, arrangement, or device employed not for any legitimate purpose but specifically to defer or delay the discharge of an obligation — particularly the payment of a debt. It appears most often as a characterizing label in equity and common law pleading to identify conduct motivated by delay rather than good faith.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase functions as a term of art in older legal pleadings and equitable proceedings rather than as a standalone doctrine. Researchers encountering it in historical sources should read it as a signal of fraudulent or bad-faith intent attached to some other legal act — a conveyance, a procedural maneuver, or a contractual arrangement — rather than as an independent cause of action. The phrase is almost entirely absent from modern legal writing, which has replaced it with direct language about fraudulent delay, dilatory tactics, or bad-faith performance. When it appears in historical records, it typically qualifies a transfer of property or the invocation of procedural rights in a way that courts treated as colorable fraud on creditors. Researchers working in equity pleading, fraudulent conveyance history, or creditor-debtor law prior to the twentieth century will find the phrase used to characterize the purpose behind an otherwise facially valid act. Its presence in a historical document is a strong indicator that the surrounding text concerns a challenge to a transaction or procedural act on grounds of bad faith toward a creditor or obligee.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines the phrase tersely: "For the purpose of delaying or postponing payment or performance." This is the full extent of the entry's content, and it provides the functional core without elaboration. The brevity of the Black's entry reflects the phrase's role as a characterizing modifier rather than a doctrinal term requiring extended analysis. No deeper conceptual treatment appears in the available historical dictionary sources. Researchers should note that the phrase belongs to a category of Latin maxims used in pleading to supply motive or intent to an otherwise neutral act, a drafting convention that was common in equity pleadings through the nineteenth century but has since been displaced by plain-language pleading standards. The absence of the phrase from modern dictionaries and treatises is itself informative: its disappearance tracks the decline of Latin pleading conventions and the rise of code pleading and notice pleading systems.