Definition
Latin: "Which the court granted." A brief formulaic phrase appearing in old English law reports to indicate that the court conceded, allowed, or agreed to a point raised before it — typically a motion, argument, or proposition put forward by counsel. It is a phrase of judicial record-keeping and report notation rather than a substantive legal doctrine in its own right.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in early English case reports should treat it as a signal of judicial assent, not a term of art with doctrinal weight. Its significance is procedural and notational: when a reporter recorded quod curia concessit, they were indicating that the court accepted the point without extended contest or formal ruling — a form of implied endorsement in the record.
The phrase appears almost exclusively in Year Books and early modern reports from the fifteenth through early eighteenth centuries. Burrill's citations to the Year Books of 4 Henry VI and 9 Henry VI, and to 6 Modern Reports, mark its natural habitat. Researchers working in those sources should recognize the phrase on sight rather than pausing to decode it; misreading it as a formal holding or judgment could distort understanding of what the court actually decided versus what it simply did not dispute.
A related trap: quod curia concessit is not the same as a formal judgment or decree. Court reporters used it to compress uncontested points, meaning the record may not explain why the court granted the point. Researchers building arguments from these early reports should note that the concession may have been contextual, unanalyzed, or simply unremarked upon — the phrase tells you the court agreed, not that it reasoned its way there.
The phrase also has no meaningful modern analog in American or contemporary English legal reporting. When tracing a principle from a Year Book or early English report that rests on quod curia concessit, researchers should treat the foundation as thin and seek corroborating authority in later, more reasoned decisions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Bouvier and Burrill define the phrase identically: "Which the court granted." There is no divergence on meaning. Burrill adds genuine research value by providing specific citations — Year Books of Michaelmas Term, 4 Henry VI (folio 19) and Michaelmas Term, 9 Henry VI (folio 40), and 6 Modern Reports 28 — situating the phrase concretely in the early fifteenth-century Year Book tradition and the early eighteenth-century English reports. These citations confirm that the phrase had consistent usage across roughly three centuries of English legal reporting.
Bouvier's entry for quod curia concessit is truncated, running into the separate entry for quod ei deforceat without a clean break — a minor editorial artifact in the dictionary that does not affect meaning but may confuse researchers reading the passage quickly.
Neither dictionary discusses why the phrase fell out of use or what replaced it in modern reporting conventions. The short answer is that modern law reports identify judicial agreement through explicit holdings, and the compressed notational conventions of the Year Books had no successor in professional legal reporting after the eighteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase is specific to the English common law tradition and its early reporting conventions. It has no independent life in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions as a term of practice or doctrine.