Definition
A plea in bar is a defensive pleading that, if sustained, defeats the opposing party's action completely and permanently — not merely delaying or limiting it, but extinguishing it entirely. The term derives from the procedural concept of "barring" the action: a successful plea in bar does not simply push back against one element of a claim but destroys the plaintiff's right to proceed at all.
In civil practice, a plea in bar asserts some fact or legal ground that operates as a complete, final answer to the cause of action — such as the running of a statute of limitations, a prior judgment on the same matter, a release, or a satisfaction of the claim. The plea admits, for purposes of argument, that the plaintiff's claim might otherwise be valid, but contends that some supervening fact or rule of law bars its enforcement.
In criminal practice, a plea in bar asserts a ground that legally prevents prosecution from going forward — typically former jeopardy (double jeopardy), a pardon, or the running of the applicable statute of limitations. It is distinct from a plea of guilty or not guilty to the merits; it is a preliminary plea asserting that the court cannot rightly try the defendant on the charge at all.
In both contexts, the defining characteristic is finality: a plea in bar, if allowed, ends the litigation with prejudice.
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Common Confusion
PLEA IN BAR vs. PLEA IN ABATEMENT: These are the two primary categories of defensive pleas in the common law tradition, and they are frequently conflated. A plea in abatement does not defeat the action outright — it merely suspends or defeats the current proceeding on technical or procedural grounds (misnomer, defective process, wrong venue), leaving the plaintiff free to recommence a properly framed action. A plea in bar defeats the action permanently, regardless of how the plaintiff might refile. The practical consequence is significant: a successful plea in abatement gives the plaintiff another chance; a successful plea in bar does not.
PLEA IN BAR vs. DEMURRER: A demurrer challenges the legal sufficiency of the opposing party's pleading on its face, without introducing new facts. A plea in bar introduces affirmative facts — the release, the prior judgment, the statute of limitations — that defeat the action. A demurrer says "even if true, this states no claim." A plea in bar says "there is a separate reason why this claim cannot proceed."
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Special Plea in Bar (Criminal): In criminal procedure, the special plea in bar is a formal pleading raising a specific legal bar to prosecution — most commonly former acquittal, former conviction, former jeopardy, or pardon. It is interposed before the defendant pleads to the general issue (not guilty) and is decided as a preliminary matter.
General Issue as Bar: In some historical usage, a plea of the general issue (not guilty) could function as a plea in bar in the sense that it put the whole cause in issue and, if resolved for the defendant, barred the action. Modern pleading systems have largely dissolved this distinction.
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Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: This is primarily a historical evolution term with significant vocabulary drift. Researchers working across historical and modern sources need to track both the terminology shift and the procedural absorption.
The phrase "plea in bar" is common in primary sources from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and in the treatise literature of that era. Its frequency declines sharply in twentieth-century American sources as code pleading and then the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure replaced common law forms of pleading. In modern federal and most state civil practice, what was once formally styled a plea in bar appears instead as an affirmative defense under Rule 8(c) or its state equivalents. The label disappears; the substance — statute of limitations, res judicata, release — survives under different terminology.
In criminal sources, the phrase has more durability. Treatises on criminal procedure and some state codes continue to use "special plea in bar" for double jeopardy and pardon claims, particularly in jurisdictions that retain more formal pleading structures. Researchers working with nineteenth-century criminal records, indictments, or trial transcripts will encounter it frequently.
Trap for researchers: Because Rapalje & Lawrence's entry cross-references BAR and PLEA without independent definition, researchers using that dictionary alone may miss the operative distinction between a plea in bar and a plea in abatement. The substantive content lives in the Burrill and Black's entries, not in Rapalje.
Corpus connection: When tracing res judicata or double jeopardy arguments in historical sources, the plea in bar is often the procedural vehicle. Researchers following these doctrines backward through time should expect the doctrine to appear under this label rather than under modern terminology.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries are substantively identical, both defining the plea in bar as one that "goes to bar the plaintiff's action, that is, to defeat it absolutely and entirely," and both citing the same two sources: Burrill's Practice and Blackstone's Commentaries. This convergence is not coincidence — the definition had been stable in English legal literature since at least Blackstone, and the American dictionaries were drawing from that settled tradition.
Burrill adds the historical gloss that the plea in bar was "anciently termed a bar" and gestures toward the Latin and Law French roots (placitare, pleder), noting the survival of the concept in the word "implead." This linguistic context is useful for researchers reading medieval or early modern English records, where the terminology appears in variant forms.
Rapalje & Lawrence's decision to cross-reference rather than define independently is worth noting as a research caution: it signals that by the time of that dictionary's compilation, the term was considered settled enough not to require independent treatment, but it leaves the researcher without substantive guidance if they have not already consulted the BAR and PLEA entries.
What the historical dictionaries collectively understate is the term's jurisdictional variation in American practice — specifically, the divergence between equity courts (which had parallel but distinct pleading structures) and courts of law, and the eventual absorption of the concept into modern codes.
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Jurisdictional Note
In jurisdictions retaining code pleading derived from the Field Code model, affirmative defenses function as the modern equivalent of pleas in bar, though the label is generally abandoned. In criminal practice, some states — particularly those with older statutory frameworks — preserve the formal "special plea in bar" for double jeopardy claims, and the terminology may appear in current state rules or appellate decisions. Researchers should check whether the jurisdiction of interest has a surviving formal plea structure before assuming the term is purely historical.
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