Definition
Latin: "I was not present." A formal notation historically used by a judge or reporter to indicate that the noted individual was absent from the proceeding being reported. The phrase appears in early English legal reports as a marginal or appended note, signaling that the person identified did not participate in the case or was not present at the time of argument or decision.
The phrase carries no independent substantive legal effect. It is a record-keeping and attribution convention, not a legal doctrine or term of art with operative consequences.
Common Confusion
Non interfui should not be confused with terms of similar construction that carry substantive legal weight, such as non compos mentis (not of sound mind) or non est factum (it is not his deed). Those phrases are operative legal pleas or doctrines. Non interfui is purely notational. Researchers unfamiliar with nominative reporter conventions may mistake it for a judicial statement or a plea, but it is neither.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with early English case reporters will encounter non interfui as a notational device embedded in the margins or footers of reported cases. Its significance is bibliographic and authenticating rather than doctrinal. When you see the notation, it tells you something about the reliability or completeness of the report: the reporter or a named judge is flagging absence, which may explain gaps in the account of argument, the absence of a judicial voice from a reported opinion, or inconsistencies between reports of the same case.
The reference in all three source dictionaries to T. Jones 10 — Sir Thomas Jones's Reports, an English reporter from the late seventeenth century — situates this term squarely in the era of nominative reporters, where the identity and presence of the reporter directly affected the quality and authority of the report. In that period, legal reports were personal documents, not official records. A note of non interfui was a statement of professional candor: the reporter was disclosing a gap in firsthand knowledge.
For Law Mind corpus researchers, this term is unlikely to surface in modern legal materials. It belongs to the pre-official-reporter era of English common law. If you encounter it in a historical source, treat it as a bibliographic annotation, not a legal holding or principle. Be cautious about attributing substantive meaning to the surrounding text if a key participant has flagged their absence.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill — define the term identically: "I was not present," characterized as a reporter's note, with the same citation to T. Jones 10. The uniformity across sources reflects that this is a narrow, stable, and largely obsolete term with no contested meaning. None of the dictionaries elaborate beyond the single-sentence definition and citation, which itself signals the term's limited doctrinal footprint. Burrill adds the Latin label explicitly, consistent with his practice of classifying law Latin and law French terms by language. No source identifies any evolution in the term's meaning or any secondary applications beyond the reporter's-note context. The historical dictionaries are complete on what little there is to say.