Definition
A Latin term of direction meaning "let him be freed" or "let him be discharged." Used in legal proceedings to indicate that a person held in custody or subject to an obligation is to be released or acquitted of further liability. The term functions as a formal judicial or clerical notation authorizing discharge — most commonly appearing in the context of bail, recognizance, or other suretyship obligations where the court signals that the underlying duty or detention has been satisfied or is no longer to be enforced.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of pure procedural and clerical vocabulary, encountered almost exclusively in older English and early American court records, writs, and forms books rather than in reported opinions or statutes. Researchers working in manuscript court records, plea rolls, or early American county court minutes may encounter it as a marginal notation or docket entry indicating that a defendant, prisoner, or surety has been formally discharged.
The term does not appear with any meaningful frequency in modern legal practice or contemporary case law. Its practical significance for corpus researchers is primarily paleographic and archival: recognizing the notation when transcribing or indexing historical records, and understanding that its appearance signals the end of a custodial or obligatory status rather than a substantive ruling on the merits.
Note also that the historical dictionary entries for this term are complicated by what appears to be a transcription or typesetting error in the Rapalje & Lawrence entry, where text from an unrelated definition (concerning railway parcels) intrudes mid-entry. This kind of corruption in printed legal dictionaries is a known hazard in nineteenth-century reference works and is worth flagging for any researcher relying on Rapalje & Lawrence as a primary source for this term.
The maxim appended to this entry in both Black's editions — "Paci sunt maxime contraria vis et injuria" (Violence and injury are the things chiefly hostile to peace), attributed to Co. Litt. 161 — is a separate legal maxim that the dictionary compilers associated with the heading as a neighboring entry or cross-reference. It is not definitionally linked to paceatur itself, and researchers should treat it as incidental rather than explanatory of the term's meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's first and second editions are in full agreement on the definition: "Let him be freed or discharged." Both editions append the Coke on Littleton maxim, but neither edition provides procedural context beyond the bare translation, which limits their usefulness for understanding the precise circumstances in which the notation would appear in practice.
Rapalje & Lawrence begins with the same translation but the entry is textually corrupted, with a passage about railway parcels appearing mid-sentence. The entry is unreliable as printed and should not be used independently for this term. It does confirm the agreed translation before the corruption appears.
None of the historical sources situate the term within a specific procedural context — whether bail discharge, recognizance cancellation, or acquittal notation — leaving that inference to the broader scholarly literature on early common law procedure and court record forms. Researchers needing fuller context should consult treatises on English common law pleading and practice, or archival guides to reading historical court records.
Jurisdictional Note
The term belongs to the Latin procedural vocabulary of the English common law tradition. It carries across early American practice wherever English court forms were adopted, but it has no modern statutory or regulatory footing in any U.S. jurisdiction.