Definition
Non submissit (Latin: "he did not submit") is a plea in bar historically used in actions of debt brought on an arbitration bond — a bond conditioned on the obligor's performance of an arbitral award. The defendant pleading non submissit denies that he ever submitted to the arbitration in the first place, thereby contesting the foundational validity of the arbitration proceeding rather than the content or enforceability of any award that resulted from it.
The plea operates as a traverse of the plaintiff's assertion that the parties entered into a valid submission to arbitration. If the defendant never submitted, no valid arbitration could have occurred, no award could bind him, and no liability could attach under the bond conditioned on performing that award.
Common Confusion
Non submissit should not be confused with pleas that admit a submission but deny a valid award was rendered, or with pleas that challenge the bond itself. The three lines of defense — no submission, no award, no valid bond — were formally distinct at common law and required separate pleading. Treating non submissit as a general "arbitration defense" misreads the historical record.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow, archaic procedural term confined almost entirely to the common law plea system that governed actions of debt in English and early American courts. Researchers encountering non submissit in historical pleading records, law reports, or treatises on arbitration should understand its precise function: it challenges the existence of a submission agreement, not the regularity or correctness of an award.
The distinction matters because common law arbitration generated several distinct pleas, each attacking a different link in the chain from submission to award to bond to debt. Non submissit attacks the first link. A plea attacking the award itself (for example, that no valid award was made) is a different defense with a different procedural posture. Conflating these in historical research leads to misreading what a party was actually contesting.
The term will surface most often in pre-twentieth-century American and English reports involving arbitration bonds, a financing mechanism now largely obsolete. Modern arbitration practice — governed in the United States by the Federal Arbitration Act and state equivalents — does not use the plea system and has no direct procedural analog to non submissit. A party in modern arbitration who disputes whether a valid submission agreement exists raises that issue through a motion to stay, a petition to compel, or an objection to arbitrability, not through a formal common law plea.
Researchers working in equity records rather than common law records will not encounter this plea; equity handled submission disputes differently, and the term is specific to the debt-on-bond action at common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary give identical, terse definitions: "He did not submit. A plea to an action of debt, on a bond to perform an award, to the effect that the defendant did not submit to the arbitration." The definitions are consistent and accurate as far as they go. Neither edition elaborates on the procedural mechanics, the relationship to companion pleas (such as those denying the making of a valid award), or the broader context of arbitration bond practice. The entries function as identifiers, not as guides to the plea's operation in practice.
No meaningful divergence exists between editions on this term. Researchers needing more operational detail should consult historical treatises on common law pleading and arbitration, such as Russell on Arbitration or the pleading treatises of Chitty and Stephen, which address the structure of debt actions on awards and the available pleas in greater depth than any dictionary entry provides.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses common law arbitration bond pleading. The employment and contracts entries on non-solicitation, non-disclosure, and non-compete agreements (contracts_199, employment_127, employment_125) are not relevant to this term despite surface similarity in the "non-" prefix; they concern modern restrictive covenant law and share no substantive connection to non submissit.