Definition
Per defaltam (Latin/Law Latin: "by default") is an old procedural phrase used in common law practice to indicate that a judgment, proceeding, or outcome occurred by reason of a party's default — that is, by failure to appear, answer, or otherwise respond as required. The phrase functioned as a shorthand notation in writs, registers, and court records to identify the basis on which a court acted in the absence of a defending party.
The phrase is not a substantive doctrine in itself but a descriptive label attached to procedural outcomes. A judgment entered per defaltam is equivalent to what modern practice calls a default judgment: relief granted to the plaintiff because the defendant failed to participate in the proceeding at the required stage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English common law sources — plea rolls, yearbooks, and the Registrum Judiciale — will encounter per defaltam as a routine notation rather than a term of art requiring extended analysis. Its presence signals the procedural posture of the case: no contest was mounted, and the record will not contain argument on the merits.
The primary research trap is conflating the historical per defaltam notation with the broader modern doctrine of default judgment, which carries its own procedural architecture under rules-based systems (conditions for entry, standards for vacatur, due process constraints). The old phrase carried none of that apparatus; it was purely descriptive.
A secondary trap involves the Latin prefix per. In other legal Latin compounds — per se, per quod, per stirpes — per carries substantive or doctrinal weight. Per defaltam does not; it is a procedural annotation, not a rule of law. Researchers should resist importing the analytical weight those other per phrases carry when reading per defaltam in historical records.
Because the phrase appears most commonly in the Registrum Judiciale and similar register-based sources, researchers should treat occurrences as indexing information: a signal about case posture, not a citation to doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source providing a definition, and it is terse: "L. Lat. In old practice. By default. Reg. Jud. 47." The citation to Registrum Judiciale at page 47 anchors the phrase firmly in the register tradition of English common law practice — the formulaic books that recorded standard writs and procedural forms.
Burrill's brevity is itself informative. The phrase warranted only a cross-reference gloss because practitioners of his era understood default proceedings without elaboration. The absence of the phrase from later American legal dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's) reflects its obsolescence as a working term: American practice absorbed the concept into domestic procedural rules and dropped the Law Latin formulation.
No meaningful divergence exists among historical sources because coverage is effectively limited to Burrill. Researchers should not expect richer treatment in period encyclopedias; the phrase was a notational convention, not a contested legal concept.
Jurisdictional Note
Per defaltam as a phrase has no current operative jurisdiction. It belongs to pre-modern English common law procedure and does not appear in contemporary American, English, or Commonwealth procedural codes. The underlying concept — default for failure to appear or answer — survives universally, but under jurisdiction-specific procedural rules rather than this Latin formula.