Definition
Latin. "By the whole court." A phrase appearing in judicial reports to indicate that a ruling, opinion, or declaration was made by the entire court, unanimously and collectively, rather than by a single judge or a divided majority. When a reporter annotates a decision or passage with per totam curiam, the reader understands that the statement carries the weight of every member of the court sitting in that matter.
The phrase functions as a crediting device in older case reporting, attributing the expressed legal proposition to the full bench rather than to a named individual justice.
Common Confusion
Per totam curiam is sometimes conflated with per curiam, the more familiar Latin phrase meaning "by the court" — used in modern practice for unsigned opinions issued in the name of the court collectively. The distinction is one of emphasis and historical context. Per curiam remains in active modern use and refers to the form of an opinion (unsigned, collective). Per totam curiam was a reporter's descriptive annotation in early English reports, signaling unanimity across all sitting judges rather than simply describing the opinion's authorship format. A per curiam opinion today need not be unanimous; per totam curiam historically asserted that it was.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century English reports — the Year Books, the nominative reporters, or early American reports styled after English practice — will encounter per totam curiam as a recurring annotation. Its significance lies in what it signals about precedential weight: a proposition attributed to the whole court carried stronger authority than a statement attributed to a single judge or introduced with phrases like "quaere" or "semble."
The practical trap for modern researchers is misreading per totam curiam as equivalent to a modern unanimous opinion. Early courts did not operate under the same formal requirements for majority opinions, dissents, or written reasons. "The whole court" in a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century report may have meant two or three judges, and the reporter's characterization was not always verified or reliable. The phrase reflects the reporter's representation, not a certified judicial record.
When tracking a common-law rule back to its origins, finding per totam curiam attached to an early statement of that rule is meaningful — but researchers should corroborate with the surrounding text, the court's composition, and secondary commentary. Treatise writers frequently cited these unanimous-court annotations as evidence that a rule was settled, which compounded the weight of the phrase over time even when the original report was thin.
The phrase does not appear in modern American or English legal usage as a live procedural term. Its presence in a source is itself a dating signal: you are almost certainly working with a pre-nineteenth-century or early-nineteenth-century report or a treatise quoting from that tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Burrill's — define per totam curiam identically: "by the whole court," with the consistent observation that it is "a common phrase in the old reports." This unanimity across sources reflects the term's settled, narrow meaning and its confinement to historical practice. None of the sources develops the phrase beyond its bare translation, which itself signals that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, per totam curiam had already receded from active use into the realm of glossary.
Black's (2nd Ed.) is notable for placing the entry immediately adjacent to per tout et non per my — a separate French-Latin phrase concerning tenancy by the entirety — without suggesting any connection between the two. The adjacency is alphabetical, not conceptual. Researchers should not read any doctrinal relationship between them.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the evidentiary weight lawyers and courts assigned to the phrase when citing old reports, nor the unreliability problem inherent in the nominative reporter tradition. Those gaps are filled by understanding the broader context of early common-law reporting rather than by anything the dictionary sources provide.