Definition
A Latin maxim meaning "from time to time, and at all times." The phrase functions as a temporal qualifier in pleading and legal drafting, signifying that an act, duty, condition, or right applied continuously and without interruption — not merely on a single occasion but across the entire relevant period. In practice, it served to establish the persistent or recurring character of an obligation or state of affairs alleged in a pleading.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a pleading term, and its significance is almost entirely confined to historical common law pleading practice. Researchers encountering omnia tempora in older English or American court records, writs, or treatise discussions should understand it as a formula of temporal breadth — a device used to prevent the opposing party from defeating an allegation by pointing to a specific moment when the stated condition did not hold. It reinforced that an alleged custom, duty, or continuing act had been performed or maintained throughout the period in question rather than sporadically.
The term appears almost exclusively in pre-code pleading contexts. With the adoption of the Field Code in New York (1848) and the subsequent spread of code pleading across American jurisdictions, Latin pleading formulas of this type were largely abandoned. Federal practice under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) completed that displacement. Researchers working in post-code materials will not encounter this phrase in operative pleadings; if it appears at all in modern sources, it is in historical commentary or scholarly treatment of common law procedure.
The single consistent cross-reference in all three historical sources — Townshend's Pleadings (cited as Townsh. Pl. 17) — points to John Townshend's treatise on common law pleading, a standard American pleading reference of the nineteenth century. Researchers tracing the precise usage of the term should go there first.
No meaningful jurisdictional variation attaches to this term. Its force was bound to the common law pleading system uniformly across English and American courts that followed that system.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st ed.), Black's Law Dictionary (2nd ed.), and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term. All three render it identically — "from time to time, and at all times" — and all three cite the same single source: Townsh. Pl. 17. The unanimity reflects the term's narrow, settled function as a pleading formula with no contested meaning.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the term's practical deployment: how courts treated its absence or presence in a pleading, whether its omission was fatal, or how it interacted with other temporal averments. For that operational context, the researcher must go beyond the dictionary entries to Townshend's Pleading itself and to the broader common law pleading treatise literature, including Chitty's Pleading and Stephen's Principles of Pleading.