Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "by the whole court" or "by all the court." It denotes a ruling, judgment, or opinion issued collectively by the entire court, as opposed to one attributed to a single judge or delivered by a divided bench. When a court acts or speaks per tout le court, the decision carries the weight of unanimous concurrence — the court speaks as one body rather than through individual voices.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with Year Books and early English common law reports will encounter this phrase as a signal of unanimity or collective judicial authority. Its appearance in a record indicates that the statement or holding that follows is not merely the view of one judge but the expressed consensus of the full court. This distinction matters when assessing the persuasive or precedential weight of early decisions, where authorship and unanimity were not always clearly marked.
The phrase belongs to a family of Law French court-attribution terms — per curiam, per tout le court, and similar constructions — that early reporters used to distinguish collective rulings from individual opinions. Researchers should not assume these terms were used with perfect consistency across reporters or time periods. A Year Book entry styled per tout le court may reflect genuine unanimity, or it may simply be the reporter's shorthand for a shared result without detailed attribution. The difference is consequential when reconstructing early common law doctrine.
Because Law French was the working language of English legal proceedings and reporting from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century, fluency with phrases like this one is a prerequisite for primary-source research in the Year Books. Burrill's single citation — Yearb. P. 3 Hen. VI. 20 — anchors the phrase in the early fifteenth century, a period when Year Book reporting was well established but not yet standardized. Researchers should treat such citations as locators into a tradition, not as isolated authorities.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources. His treatment is characteristically spare: a translation ("By all the court") and a single Year Book citation. This brevity is typical of how Law French court-procedure phrases were handled in the nineteenth-century legal dictionaries — acknowledged, translated, and left without elaboration. Burrill does not explain the phrase's procedural context or distinguish it from related formulations.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any analysis of how per tout le court functioned as a reporting convention versus a statement of substantive legal effect. The phrase is a label applied by the reporter; it does not appear in the judgment roll itself. Researchers relying solely on Burrill risk treating it as a formal procedural term with defined legal consequences, when its meaning was more practical — a reporter's notation that the court was of one mind.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase is specific to the English common law tradition and its Year Book and early case report literature. It has no independent life in American legal sources and is not a term of art in any modern jurisdiction. It is encountered exclusively in historical research contexts.