Definition
A Latin clause historically inserted in English writs of execution and other process directing the sheriff "not to omit" to execute the writ by reason of any liberty or privileged district within which the defendant resides or the writ must be served. In English procedural practice, liberties were jurisdictional enclaves — territories held by private lords or ecclesiastical bodies — where an ordinary sheriff had no authority to enter or execute process without express authorization. The non omittas clause supplied that authorization, empowering the sheriff to enter the liberty and carry out the writ as if the territory were part of the general county. Without it, a defendant sheltering within a liberty could evade service entirely. The phrase translates literally as "you do not omit" or "omit not," framed as a command to the officer not to leave the writ unserved on account of any such jurisdictional obstacle.
Common Confusion
Non omittas is sometimes loosely associated with writs of capias or fieri facias as though it were itself a separate writ. It is not. It is a clause embedded within a writ, not an independent form of process. Burrill distinguishes it carefully: it is an inserted empowering clause, not a standalone instrument. After the English reforms under 2 Will. IV, c. 39 (the Civil Procedure Act 1833), every writ was framed as a non omittas by default, which effectively dissolved the distinction between writs containing the clause and those without it — making the clause structurally invisible in later practice even though still technically present.
Why It Matters in Research
Non omittas is a term encountered almost exclusively in historical English procedural materials, and researchers need to understand two things about it before they can read those sources accurately.
First, the term marks a specific gap in royal writ jurisdiction that defined much of medieval and early modern English process practice. Liberties — territories exempt from ordinary sheriff's jurisdiction — were not anomalies; they were pervasive features of the English legal landscape. Any writ touching a defendant in such a territory required the non omittas clause, and cases involving service disputes may turn on whether the clause was present. Researchers reading writs, returns of process, or procedural challenges from the pre-1833 period need to recognize when a liberty is implicated and whether the authorizing clause is present or absent.
Second, the 1833 reform matters for dating. After 2 Will. IV, c. 39, the clause became universal and formulaic. A source describing non omittas as a notable or discretionary feature of a writ is almost certainly pre-1833. A source treating it as a routine matter of drafting is likely post-reform. This is useful for situating undated procedural texts on the Law Mind corpus shelf.
American researchers will rarely encounter the term in domestic sources. American courts did not inherit the liberty system in the same form, and sheriff's jurisdiction across counties was handled through different procedural mechanisms. When the term does appear in American secondary sources, it is almost invariably in a historical or comparative discussion of English process. Its presence in Black's (both editions) reflects the encyclopedic character of those dictionaries rather than active American usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the core function: non omittas is a clause, not a writ, authorizing the sheriff to enter a liberty and execute process. The entries converge on the same operational problem — that a liberty would otherwise shield a defendant from service — and on the same solution.
Burrill is the most precise and historically informative of the three. He explains that the clause appears in writs of capias and "other process," identifies the empowering function specifically (entering a liberty where a defendant resides), and cites both Tidd's Practice and Chitty's General Practice for authority. Critically, Burrill adds the post-reform gloss: after 2 Will. IV, c. 39, every writ was framed as a non omittas, which effectively normalized and then obscured the clause's historical distinctiveness. This is the most useful piece of information in the shelf entries for dating purposes.
Black's (1st Ed.) cites Stephen's Commentaries (2 Steph. Comm. 630) and identifies the clause as appearing in "writs of execution" — slightly narrower than Burrill's formulation, which includes capias and other process. Black's (2nd Ed.) adds that the clause directs the sheriff "not to omit" to execute, consistent with the literal translation, but the entry as excerpted in the source material is fragmentary (the digital extract opens mid-entry on an unrelated subject before reaching non omittas). Neither Black's edition engages the post-1833 reform context that Burrill captures.
What the shelf sources collectively miss: none of them explains why liberties existed or how many there were, leaving the researcher without context for why this clause was so routinely necessary. They also do not address the return side of the problem — what happened when a sheriff attempted to execute within a liberty without the clause, or how courts treated defective process on this ground.
Jurisdictional Note
Non omittas is a creature of English law with no meaningful American parallel. The liberty system that made the clause necessary did not transplant to the American colonies in the same form. The term appears in American legal dictionaries as a matter of historical completeness, not as a working term of American practice. Researchers working in colonial American materials should be cautious: local equivalents of privileged jurisdictions existed in some colonies, but the precise English mechanism did not uniformly apply.