Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "that the bill be quashed." In common-law procedure, this was the form of judgment entered when a court sustained a plea in abatement in cases commenced by bill — that is, by a capias (an arrest writ directed at the defendant's person) rather than by an original writ. The judgment did not resolve the merits of the underlying dispute; it terminated the particular proceeding on procedural grounds, leaving the plaintiff free to begin again by proper process.
The phrase is the bill-side counterpart to cassetur breve ("that the writ be quashed"), which served the same function when the proceeding had been commenced by original writ. The choice between the two formulas depended entirely on how the action was initiated.
Common Confusion
QUOD BILLA CASSETUR and CASSETUR BREVE are frequently listed together and are functionally equivalent in effect — both are judgments sustaining a plea in abatement on procedural grounds — but they are not interchangeable in form. The distinction tracks the method of commencement: quod billa cassetur applies when process issued by capias (bill); cassetur breve applies when process issued by original writ. Conflating them in historical research can obscure what type of process was used to initiate the action, which itself carries information about the nature of the suit and the court in which it was brought. A third related term, billa cassetur, is the abbreviated form of the same judgment; researchers will encounter all three variants in historical records.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern common-law procedural records and will rarely if ever surface in materials after the nineteenth century. Its practical significance for corpus researchers lies in several areas.
First, the term is a diagnostic marker. Its presence in a record tells you that (a) the action was commenced by capias rather than original writ, (b) the defendant raised a plea in abatement rather than pleading to the merits, and (c) the court found that plea meritorious. Each of these facts narrows the procedural and jurisdictional context considerably.
Second, the plea in abatement that generated this judgment did not bar the plaintiff permanently. Recognizing quod billa cassetur for what it is — a procedural dismissal without prejudice — prevents misreading a terminated proceeding as a final judgment on the merits. Researchers tracing the outcome of historical litigation must be alert to the possibility that the same dispute continued under a different filing after this judgment issued.
Third, the formula belongs to a cluster of highly formulaic Latin judgments that appear in standardized form across centuries of English and early American practice. Because these phrases were copied verbatim from form books and precedent rolls, encountering them in a document does not necessarily indicate that the scrivener understood their precise meaning. They should be read as terms of art, not as evidence of the drafter's independent legal analysis.
Fourth, the disappearance of this term from American practice tracks the abolition of the forms of action and the merger of law and equity under the Field Code (New York, 1848) and eventually the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938). In jurisdictions that retained common-law pleading longer, the term persisted further into the nineteenth century. Researchers working with materials from code-pleading states will find the term absent from records much earlier than in states that were slower to reform procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree entirely on the meaning and are remarkably terse. Both editions of Black's define quod billa cassetur as "that the bill be quashed" and identify it as the judgment sustaining a plea in abatement where proceedings were by bill rather than by original writ. The second edition adds a stylistic flourish but no new substance. Bouvier declines to define the phrase directly, redirecting the reader to billa cassetur and cassetur breve — a cross-referencing choice that implicitly confirms the three terms occupy the same conceptual space.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: they say nothing about the procedural consequences for the plaintiff after the judgment issued, nothing about the tactical use of pleas in abatement to delay litigation, and nothing about how American courts adapted or abandoned this terminology as procedural reform advanced. Researchers seeking that context must turn to treatises on common-law pleading — Gould, Stephen, or Chitty — rather than relying on dictionary entries alone.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is English common law in origin and migrated into early American practice in jurisdictions that adopted common-law pleading. Its use was extinguished jurisdiction by jurisdiction as procedural codes replaced the forms of action. It has no operative meaning in modern American practice.