Definition
A Latin term meaning "he follows up," "he pursues," or "he prosecutes." In procedural law, *prosequitur* denotes the formal act of a plaintiff or prosecutor pressing forward with an action — continuing to pursue the case rather than abandoning it. The term appears most often in older procedural records as a notation confirming that a party is actively prosecuting a pending matter.
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Common Confusion
*Prosequitur* is most meaningfully understood alongside its procedural counterpart *non prosequitur* (abbreviated *non pros*). Where *prosequitur* signals continuation of an action, *non pros* is the entry or judgment entered when a plaintiff fails to pursue the case with sufficient diligence — functioning as a precursor to dismissal for want of prosecution. Researchers encountering either term in historical records should treat them as a matched pair: *prosequitur* confirms activity; *non pros* records its absence. The two are not interchangeable, but their meaning is relational, and one rarely appears in practice without the other being implicitly relevant.
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Why It Matters in Research
*Prosequitur* is almost exclusively a term of historical procedural practice. Researchers will encounter it primarily in pre-twentieth-century court records, pleading books, and common law procedural treatises rather than in modern case law or contemporary practice guides. Its practical significance lies in what its presence or absence in a record communicates: a *prosequitur* entry confirms the prosecution of an action at a particular stage, while its absence — potentially replaced by a *non pros* — signals procedural failure or abandonment.
When working in the Law Mind corpus, researchers should note that *prosequitur* rarely appears as a standalone entry in historical sources; Black's references it almost parenthetically, directing readers immediately to *non pros* for the more developed treatment. This asymmetry reflects how the term was used in practice: courts and clerks were far more likely to record the failure to prosecute than its continuation, making *non pros* the procedurally consequential entry and *prosequitur* the implicit baseline against which that failure was measured.
Researchers tracing the procedural history of a common law action, particularly in equity or at common law before code pleading reforms of the nineteenth century, should treat this term as a marker of formal docket notation practice. Its appearance in a record does not necessarily mean a party filed a document styled *prosequitur* — it may simply be a clerk's notation confirming active prosecution at a given stage.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary consulted here provide identical substantive content: a brief Latin gloss ("he follows up or pursues; he prosecutes") and an immediate cross-reference to *non pros*. Neither edition elaborates on procedural context, historical usage, or the circumstances under which the term would appear in practice. This terseness is itself informative — it reflects the term's status as a functional procedural marker rather than a legally complex concept. Black's treats it as a dependent term, meaningful primarily in contrast to its negative counterpart.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any treatment of how *prosequitur* functioned within the broader machinery of common law pleading — its relationship to continuances, the role of the clerk in recording it, or how code pleading reforms effectively retired the term from active use. Researchers needing that context will need to consult procedural treatises of the era rather than the dictionary shelf.
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