Definition
Petit judicium (Latin: "prays judgment") is a procedural phrase used in old common law pleading to signal that a party formally requests the court to render judgment in the party's favor. It appeared at the conclusion of a pleading — typically a demurrer or special plea — where the pleading party, having stated the grounds for relief or objection, closed by petitioning the court to decide the legal question raised. The phrase was a term of art in the formulaic pleading system of early English and American common law, not a substantive legal concept in itself, but a required structural element of a valid pleading under that system.
The term is sometimes rendered in abbreviated or variant form (petit, petyt, petite) in historical sources, reflecting its Anglo-Norman and Latin mixed origins in medieval legal practice.
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Common Confusion
Petit judicium should not be confused with the broader Latin term judicium (judgment, or trial itself), nor with the Law French adjective petit/petite (small, little) as used in phrases like petit jury or petit larceny. The word petit here is a verb form — from the Latin petere, to seek or pray — not the adjective meaning small. Researchers encountering "petit" in old records must determine from context whether it functions as an adjective (petit jury, petit serjeant) or as a verb form within a formulaic pleading clause.
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Why It Matters in Research
Petit judicium is primarily a term for researchers working in early common law pleading records, Year Books, early English reports, or American colonial and early federal court records where formal common law pleading remained in use. Several research traps apply.
First, the phrase appears in pleading manuscripts and printed reports as a formulaic closing, often abbreviated or run together with surrounding text. Researchers unfamiliar with the pleading formulary may mistake it for a case-specific legal argument rather than a stock procedural phrase.
Second, the term effectively disappears from American legal practice with the adoption of code pleading in the mid-nineteenth century (following New York's Field Code of 1848) and accelerates into obsolescence with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938. Any source using the phrase in a live procedural context will date to well before these reforms. Its presence in a document is itself a dating and jurisdictional signal.
Third, Burrill's citation to 6 Mod. 236 and 10 Mod. 210–211 points to the Modern Reports series (cases from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in English courts). Researchers seeking primary authority for the phrase's procedural function should look to those sources and to English pleading treatises of the period, such as those by Chitty or Stephen on Pleading, rather than to later American authorities where the phrase was already archaic.
Fourth, researchers should note that petit judicium is distinct from the judgment itself. It is the party's formal prayer or request for judgment — the act of putting the legal question to the court — not the court's response. The court's actual determination would follow as the judicium proper.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives the most direct treatment available in the Law Mind corpus: "Prays judgment. 6 Mod. 236. 10 Id. 210, 211." The entry is appropriately spare. Burrill correctly classifies the term as belonging to "old practice," signaling to his nineteenth-century readership that the phrase was already historical when he wrote. He appends a note on petit/petyt/petite as Law French for "small; little; petty," with the adverbial form petitement (easily), drawn from Kelham's dictionary of Norman-French legal terms — a useful reminder that petit in the pleading formula is etymologically related to but functionally distinct from the adjectival petit in more familiar compounds.
Historical dictionaries generally treat petit judicium as a technical pleading term requiring no extended commentary. This reflects its status as procedural machinery rather than a substantive legal doctrine. Researchers should not expect deeper analytical treatment in period sources; the phrase's meaning was self-evident to practitioners trained in formal common law pleading and needed no elaboration.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is specific to common law pleading jurisdictions — primarily England and early American jurisdictions that imported English common law procedure. It has no equivalent role in civil law systems. With the abolition of common law pleading forms across American jurisdictions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the phrase lost all operative legal significance.
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