Definition
Latin. "That the parties do replead." A formal judgment phrase directing the parties to a lawsuit to replead — that is, to submit new pleadings — when the court determines that the existing pleadings are so defective or inconclusive that they fail to properly join an issue for decision. The phrase itself constitutes the operative language of a judgment on award of a repleader.
A repleader was a common law procedural remedy invoked when the pleadings, taken together, revealed a material defect in the way the issue had been framed — typically because the pleadings, though facially responsive to one another, resulted in no intelligible or triable issue. The judgment *quod partes replacitent* wiped away the defective pleadings and sent the parties back to begin the pleading process again, usually from the point at which the error first arose.
Common Confusion
Do not confuse *quod partes replacitent* (the judgment directing a repleader) with *replevin* (the common law action to recover personal property wrongfully taken or detained). The words look and sound related but refer to entirely different legal concepts — one procedural, one substantive. Similarly, the term should not be confused with *respondeat ouster*, another common law judgment form that directed a defendant who had pleaded a dilatory plea unsuccessfully to answer over on the merits. Both are judgment formulas in old pleading practice, but *respondeat ouster* applies after a failed dilatory plea; *quod partes replacitent* applies when the pleadings, considered together, fail to frame a proper issue.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is exclusively a creature of common law pleading practice under the old system of formal pleadings, largely abolished in England by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and in American federal practice by the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938. Researchers encountering it in case reports or treatises are almost certainly working in materials predating those reforms.
The phrase functions as a judgment formula, not a substantive doctrine, so it will appear in reporters and plea rolls rather than in statutory or constitutional sources. It is closely tied to the procedural literature surrounding special pleading — particularly works like Chitty on Pleading and Stephen on Pleading — where the mechanics of repleader and the conditions under which a court would award one are analyzed at length. Researchers should not expect to find the phrase in modern civil procedure sources; its appearance in a source is itself a dating signal.
One research trap: because "repleader" and "replevin" share a root and both appear in old common law materials, the two are sometimes confused. They are entirely distinct. Replevin is a possessory action for recovery of chattels; a repleader is a procedural directive to re-plead. The judgment phrase *quod partes replacitent* belongs exclusively to the repleader context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: all three define the term identically as the form of the judgment on award of a repleader, and all three cite the same authority — 2 Salk. 579, a reference to Salkeld's Reports, a collection of King's Bench decisions from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The unanimity across sources is unsurprising given how narrow and technical the term is; it admits of no real variation in meaning.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any analytical context about when courts awarded repleaders, what defects in pleading triggered the remedy, or how the judgment interacted with the broader architecture of common law pleading. Researchers seeking that context should turn to the pleading treatises of the nineteenth century rather than the dictionary entries, which function here purely as formula repositories.