Definition
Nihil dicit (Latin: "he says nothing") is a procedural default judgment entered against a defendant who, having been properly served, fails to file a plea or answer to the plaintiff's declaration by the date required by the court. Because the defendant has offered no response, the court treats the failure as a concession and enters judgment in the plaintiff's favor as a matter of course. The defendant's silence is taken as the absence of any ground to contest the claim.
Nihil dicit differs from a judgment by default in the strictest sense: a true default judgment typically arises when the defendant fails to appear at all, while nihil dicit arises when the defendant has appeared but then fails to plead. In practice the distinction collapsed in many American courts over time, and both results—appearance without pleading, and non-appearance—were treated under a unified default judgment procedure.
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Common Confusion
NIHIL DICIT vs. NON SUM INFORMATUS vs. DEFAULT JUDGMENT: These three procedural outcomes are closely related and were frequently conflated in older practice. Non sum informatus ("I am not informed") was the formal entry made by an attorney acknowledging that no instruction to plead had been received—effectively a managed capitulation that also opened the door to judgment against the defendant. Nihil dicit arose from pure silence after appearance. A general default judgment could arise from failure to appear at all. In modern federal and most state practice, all three are collapsed into the single mechanism of default and default judgment under rules-based civil procedure. Researchers reading pre-twentieth-century pleading records must distinguish among them to understand the procedural posture of a case.
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Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: historical evolution. This is a term rooted in common law pleading that has largely disappeared from modern procedural vocabulary, surviving mainly in historical court records and older treatises. Researchers encounter it almost exclusively in pre-code materials.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the term appears in court records and docket books through the nineteenth century, often abbreviated as "nihil dic." or rendered simply as "nihil." A researcher scanning historical records who does not recognize the abbreviation may misread the procedural posture of the entire case.
Second, the distinction between nihil dicit and a general default was technically meaningful in common law pleading but was applied inconsistently across American state courts. Some courts used the terms interchangeably; others preserved the technical distinction. A researcher relying on one state's practice to interpret another's records may draw incorrect conclusions.
Third, the quantum of proof required after nihil dicit judgment was not uniform. On liquidated demands (debt in a fixed sum), judgment went directly for the amount claimed. On unliquidated demands (assumpsit for damages not yet assessed), a writ of inquiry or inquest might still be required to fix the amount. Early American case reporters reflect this variation, and a nihil dicit entry in a docket does not automatically mean the plaintiff received all relief sought without further proceeding.
Fourth, this term connects directly to the broader structure of common law pleading—declaration, plea, replication, and the consequences of default at each stage. Researchers working in equity records will not encounter nihil dicit, which is a common law pleading term; the equity counterpart to failing to answer was a bill taken pro confesso.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines nihil dicit as "the name of the judgment rendered against a defendant who fails to put in a plea or answer to the plaintiff's declaration by the day assigned," noting that in such cases judgment is given "as he says nothing why it should not." Bouvier cross-references Viner's Abridgment and Dane's Abridgment, signaling that the doctrine was well-established enough to appear in the major systematic digests of Anglo-American common law.
Bouvier's entry is accurate as far as it goes but is notably terse. It does not address the distinction between liquidated and unliquidated demands, the procedural steps that followed entry of nihil dicit (assessment of damages where required), or the jurisdictional variation in American state practice. Researchers should supplement Bouvier with Tidd's Practice and Gould's Pleading for fuller procedural context, and with Stephen's Pleading for the underlying doctrinal structure.
The adjacent entry in Bouvier—nihil est, a sheriff's return that process could not be served—is a distinct term that shares the nihil prefix and occasionally appears in the same docket entries, creating potential for confusion.
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Jurisdictional Note
Nihil dicit as a distinct procedural category survived longer in states that retained common law pleading forms into the late nineteenth century. States that adopted code pleading early (New York after 1848; later, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938) replaced nihil dicit with unified default judgment procedures. In jurisdictions where the Field Code or analogous reforms were adopted, the term disappears from practice within a generation, though it continues to appear in the case law interpreting rights that accrued under the old system.
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