Definition
Que tali causa is a Latin and Law French pleading formula meaning "without such cause." It appears in replications — the plaintiff's response to a defendant's plea — in actions of trespass, and operates as a formal traverse: that is, a denial of the factual justification the defendant has offered. The full phrase is de son tort demesne sans tiel cause, meaning "of his own wrong, without such cause." In practice, by the time Burrill was writing, the longer form had been compressed into the shorthand traverse de injuria, but que tali causa captures the operative denial contained within it.
The classic context is an action of trespass for assault and battery. The defendant pleads son assault demesne — that the plaintiff struck first and the defendant acted in self-defense. The plaintiff, in replication, does not simply deny everything; instead, using the que tali causa form, the plaintiff admits the general circumstances while denying that those circumstances constituted a lawful excuse. The effect is to traverse the cause — the legal justification — rather than the act itself.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a feature of common law pleading practice under the old system of forms of action, and researchers will encounter it primarily in pre-nineteenth-century English cases and in American cases from the same era that followed English pleading conventions. After the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century — the English Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and the American Field Code reforms beginning in 1848 — formal pleading requirements of this kind were largely abolished in favor of notice pleading, and que tali causa effectively disappeared from live practice.
Researchers working in historical trespass litigation should distinguish between the traverse de injuria (of which que tali causa is the defining element) and a general denial. The traverse de injuria admits the defendant's act and denies the lawful excuse; a general denial disputes everything. Confusing the two can cause misreading of what was actually in dispute before the court.
Because que tali causa is deeply embedded in the mechanics of common law pleading, researchers following a historical trespass case into secondary sources will need familiarity with the broader system of replications, rejoinders, and surrejoinders to understand where this formula sits in the exchange of pleadings. Burrill connects it to self-defense pleas specifically, but the logic of traversing a cause rather than the underlying act extends to other justification pleas in trespass — including pleas of license, legal process, and necessity.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source treating this term in the Law Mind corpus, and its entry is characteristically precise. Burrill correctly identifies the dual-language origin — Latin que tali causa embedded within the Law French formula de son tort demesne sans tiel cause — and accurately names the traverse de injuria as the more compact descendant form. The entry breaks off mid-sentence in the available excerpt, but the trajectory is clear: the formula was applied where a defendant pleaded a specific factual justification, and the plaintiff's replication denied not the defendant's act but the defendant's cause for it.
No other Law Mind shelf sources treat this term directly. Researchers seeking fuller development of the pleading mechanics surrounding que tali causa should consult historical treatises on common law pleading, particularly Chitty's Treatise on Pleading and the Parties to Actions (multiple editions through the mid-nineteenth century) and Gould's Treatise on the Principles of Pleading in Civil Actions (1832), both of which address the traverse de injuria in detail. Stephen's Principles of Pleading (1824) is also standard for understanding how traverses functioned within the system of common law forms.
Jurisdictional Note
Que tali causa and the traverse de injuria it anchors are features of English common law pleading inherited across American jurisdictions. American courts applying pre-code pleading rules used the formula in the same way English courts did. After Field Code reforms spread through most American states in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and after the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect in 1938, the term ceased to have operational significance in modern American practice.