Definition
A Latin legal term from old English law meaning "pleadable" — that is, capable of being raised as a plea, submitted to a court, or made the subject of a formal legal proceeding. A matter or claim described as placitabile was one that could properly be brought before a tribunal and argued through the established forms of pleading.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources and has no practical life in contemporary law. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a marker of historical pleading context — the word signals that a source is addressing whether a particular matter was cognizable within the formal pleading system of the English common law courts, where strict rules governed what could and could not be submitted as a plea.
The term is most likely to surface in Latin legal manuscripts, early Year Books, or treatises on the forms of action, where the question of whether a grievance was placitabile determined whether a litigant had any avenue of relief. A claim that was not placitabile was effectively outside the reach of the courts under the existing procedural framework — a significant limitation in a system where procedure and substance were deeply intertwined.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should be alert to the relationship between placitabile and the broader machinery of pleading: the forms of action, the writ system, and the distinction between matters cognizable at common law versus those heard only in equity or ecclesiastical courts. The term indexes into that procedural architecture directly.
Because all three source dictionaries cite Spelman — referring to Sir Henry Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum — researchers seeking fuller context should consult that work. Spelman's glossary is the foundational reference for archaic Latin legal terms of English origin and provides the surrounding doctrinal and historical tissue that the dictionary entries compress to a single word.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three sources — Black's Law Dictionary (both first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary — provide identical entries: "pleadable," citing Spelman. There is no divergence among the sources, no additional commentary, and no contextual elaboration. Burrill's adds the notation "L. Lat." (Law Latin), correctly situating the term within the hybrid Latin of the English legal profession rather than classical or ecclesiastical Latin.
The consensus is complete but thin. None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on what conditions made a matter pleadable or non-pleadable, what categories of claims the term was applied to, or how the concept evolved across the medieval and early modern periods. Researchers should not read the brevity of these entries as evidence that the concept was itself simple — the question of whether a matter was cognizable in pleading was often highly technical and contested. The dictionaries reflect the term's obscurity by the time of their compilation, not the simplicity of the underlying doctrine.