Definition
A Latin plea in the common law pleading system, meaning literally "they made no award" (or, in its fuller form, denying that arbitrators made any award). Used as a defensive plea in an action of debt brought upon an obligation conditioned on the performance of an arbitral award. By pleading nullum fecerunt arbitri, the defendant asserts that no valid award was ever made by the arbitrators, and therefore no obligation to perform has arisen.
The plea operates as a traverse — a direct denial of the factual predicate underlying the plaintiff's claim. Where a bond or obligation is conditioned upon a party performing whatever arbitrators shall award, the plaintiff must establish that an award actually issued. This plea puts that fact directly in issue.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in the context of historical common law pleading, specifically in debt actions arising out of arbitration bonds. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century English or early American court records may encounter it in plea rolls or reported cases where a party sought to defeat an arbitration-based debt action not by attacking the validity of the award's terms, but by denying that any award was made at all.
The structural distinction matters: other pleas in similar actions might challenge the award's scope, the identity of the arbitrators, or the plaintiff's performance of conditions precedent. This plea is narrower — it goes only to the existence of the award itself. Researchers should distinguish it from pleas such as non-est-factum (denying the bond itself) or performance-based defenses.
Because this plea belongs to the technical vocabulary of formal common law pleading, it will rarely if ever appear in equity records, arbitration statutes, or modern procedural materials. Its natural habitat is the common law side of the court, in debt actions, before the merger of law and equity and before statutory arbitration regimes displaced bond-conditioned enforcement of awards.
Researchers using older abridgments and digests should look under "Arbitrament and Award" and "Debt" headings, as the plea is indexed inconsistently across historical finding tools.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary identifies this as a plea to an action of debt upon an obligation for the performance of an award, by which the defendant denies submission to arbitration or the making of an award. Bouvier's entry is brief and cross-references Bacon's Abridgment under "Arbitrament" (G), which remains the most useful historical source for tracing the pleading context in detail.
The entry in Bouvier's reflects the standard treatment of arbitration-related pleas in the era of formal common law pleading: terse, categorical, and presuming familiarity with debt practice. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural aftermath — specifically, what evidence was required to sustain or defeat the plea at trial, or how courts handled disputes about whether an incomplete or conditional arbitral decision qualified as an "award" for purposes of the plea. Researchers should not assume the plea was as clean in practice as it appears in the abridgments.
No entry for this specific plea appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Termes de la Ley, or Black's Law Dictionary, making Bouvier's the primary dictionary authority for the term.
Jurisdictional Note
This plea is a creature of English common law procedure and its early American reception. It has no modern procedural equivalent under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or comparable state codes, which abolished the formal plea system. It may appear in American records through roughly the mid-nineteenth century, depending on the jurisdiction's timing of procedural reform.