Definition
Ne recipiatur (Latin: "that it be not received") is a procedural warning or caveat entered by a party to prevent the opposing party from filing a writ, record, or other document with the court when that filing has not been made within the required time or is otherwise improper. The effect is to put the court on notice that the adverse party's submission should not be accepted.
The term carries two related but distinct applications in historical practice:
1. General procedural caveat. A party may lodge a ne recipiatur to block the opponent from filing a trial record, writ, or similar document — typically on grounds of tardiness or procedural irregularity. In American practice, defendants employed this mechanism to prevent the filing of a plaintiff's trial record.
2. Ecclesiastical and quare impedit context. In actions of quare impedit (a writ to recover the right of presentation to a church living), either party fearing that the bishop would admit the other's clerk during the pendency of the suit could enter a ne recipiatur as a caveat against that presentation proceeding while litigation continued.
Common Confusion
Ne recipiatur is occasionally confused with a motion to strike or a demurrer, but it is a distinct creature of older practice. A motion to strike challenges a document after it has been received; a ne recipiatur operates before or at the moment of filing, functioning as a pre-emptive block. It should also be distinguished from a caveat in the probate sense, which similarly warns a court to take no action, but in a wholly different procedural context.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is effectively extinct in American and English practice as a live procedural device, but it appears with some regularity in pre-twentieth-century pleading records, practice manuals, and equity proceedings. Researchers working in colonial, early republic, or nineteenth-century trial records may encounter ne recipiatur as a docketed entry or marginal notation without explanation, and misreading it as a substantive pleading (such as a plea) rather than a procedural caveat will distort understanding of what occurred at that stage of litigation.
The ecclesiastical application is almost entirely confined to English common law sources and is unlikely to appear in American materials except in cases touching on early Anglican church governance in colonial jurisdictions. Researchers tracing quare impedit actions in English records should treat ne recipiatur as a signal that a presentation dispute was active and that one party moved to freeze the bishop's action.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is garbled in the surviving source — the ne recipiatur entry is embedded within surrounding text concerning navigation and customs law, reflecting a printing or compilation error rather than any substantive connection between those topics. Researchers relying on that source should treat the entry with caution and cross-check against Burrill and Black's.
Burrill's remains the most useful of the three historical sources for American practice, specifically noting adoption by defendants to block the plaintiff's trial record — a usage that helps locate the term within the procedural sequence of a common law action approaching trial.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning — a caveat preventing receipt of a filing — but differ in emphasis and scope. Black's foregrounds the ecclesiastical quare impedit application, citing Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium, and gives less attention to the general procedural use. Burrill provides the most practically useful account, grounding the term in common law pleading procedure and noting its American adoption, with references to Bohun's Institutio Legalis and Burr's Practice. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is compromised by the apparent typesetting error described above and should not be relied upon independently.
None of the three sources addresses whether American courts ever developed a formal procedural rule supplanting ne recipiatur, or when exactly the device fell into disuse. The silence on that transition is a gap researchers should note: the mechanism appears to have been absorbed into general motions practice and court rules governing filing deadlines without any explicit moment of abolition.
Jurisdictional Note
Ne recipiatur as a named procedural device belongs to the common law tradition and appears in both English and early American sources. Its ecclesiastical dimension is exclusive to English practice. In American jurisdictions, modern rules of civil procedure governing filing deadlines and motions practice have rendered the ne recipiatur obsolete as a distinct named proceeding, though the underlying function — preventing acceptance of an untimely or improper filing — persists in different procedural forms.