Definition
A temporal publication or notice formula appearing in statutes, court rules, and procedural codes requiring that a notice, advertisement, or announcement be published once in each of three consecutive weeks. The phrase specifies both frequency (once per week) and duration (three successive, meaning uninterrupted, weeks), typically in the context of legal notice published in a newspaper of general circulation.
The formula does not require a fixed total of days between first and last publication. It requires that one publication appear in each of three calendar weeks that follow one another without interruption. A publication that skips a week, or that publishes twice in one week and not at all in the next, does not satisfy the requirement even if the total number of insertions equals three.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a creature of statutory drafting and appears almost exclusively in notice, publication, and service-of-process contexts — probate notices, foreclosure advertisements, divorce by publication, name-change petitions, and the like. Researchers encountering it in historical sources must understand that compliance was strictly construed: courts routinely voided proceedings where publication deviated from the formula, even technically.
The critical research trap is assuming that "three publications" equals "once a week during three successive weeks." Courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consistently rejected that equivalence. A single week's double publication did not cure a missed week. See the reference at 2 Miles (Pa.) 150–151, which addresses statutory construction of week-based publication requirements in Pennsylvania.
Jurisdictional variation in how "week" was defined — calendar week (Sunday through Saturday) versus any rolling seven-day period — was a recurring source of litigation. Researchers using historical newspaper archives to verify compliance with notice requirements should identify the controlling jurisdiction's definition of "week" before concluding that a publication record satisfies the statute.
Modern statutes have largely replaced this formula with explicit day-count requirements (e.g., "published on three separate days, at least seven days apart"), but the older phrasing persists in historical records and in states that have not substantially revised their civil procedure or probate codes since the nineteenth century. When reading older case law that turns on notice sufficiency, this phrase is often the operative test.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence cite 2 Miles (Pa.) 150, 151 without extended commentary, treating the phrase as a recognized statutory term of art whose meaning was fixed by judicial construction rather than by ordinary definition. This reflects the pattern common to nineteenth-century legal dictionaries: publication formulas were considered self-defining within their procedural context, and dictionary compilers typically pointed researchers to the controlling case rather than attempting an independent gloss.
What the historical dictionaries do not address — and what researchers must supply from case law — is the question of what counts as "successive." Courts generally held that "successive weeks" meant consecutive, unbroken weeks, with no gap permitted between publication dates that would place them in non-adjacent weeks. A missed week reset the sequence in most jurisdictions.
Historical dictionaries also do not address the interaction between this formula and the publication day of the particular newspaper. Because newspapers were not universally published on the same day of the week, "once a week" necessarily meant once per issue cycle, and courts occasionally had to determine whether a weekly paper publishing on varying days could satisfy a requirement that assumed a fixed weekly schedule.
Jurisdictional Note
Pennsylvania courts, as reflected in the Miles citation, applied strict construction to week-based publication statutes. Other states varied in whether they required strict or substantial compliance, with the modern trend favoring substantial compliance where the purpose of the notice was demonstrably achieved. Researchers working across jurisdictions should not assume that a ruling from one state's courts on this formula controls another's.