Definition
Quod prostravit (Latin: "that he do abate" or "that he has prostrated/thrown down") is the name given to a specific form of judgment entered upon a successful indictment for a public nuisance. The judgment commands that the defendant abate — that is, remove or eliminate — the nuisance found by the court. Rather than awarding damages or imposing a fine as the primary relief, the quod prostravit judgment directs the defendant to take affirmative action to end the offending condition.
The term functions as a technical label for the judgment itself, not for the underlying cause of action or the proceeding. When courts and treatise writers refer to a "judgment of quod prostravit," they mean a court order requiring abatement by the defendant as the operative remedy.
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Common Language
This is pure legal Latin with no meaningful counterpart in ordinary English usage. The phrase does not appear in general dictionaries and carries no common-language meaning independent of its procedural legal context. The individual Latin words ("quod" = that; "prostravit" = he has thrown down, laid flat, demolished) describe the physical act of demolishing or razing — appropriate imagery for abating a physical nuisance such as an encroachment or obstruction, though the judgment's reach is broader than demolition alone.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering quod prostravit in historical sources should understand several things.
First, the term is almost exclusively historical. It belongs to the era of common-law criminal nuisance indictments and the formal judgment language associated with them. Modern nuisance law, whether pursued civilly or by public enforcement action, does not use this Latin form. Finding quod prostravit in a source is itself a temporal signal — you are almost certainly reading materials from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, or treatises that systematized that era's law.
Second, quod prostravit is one of several Latin judgment-name terms that identify a remedy by its operative command rather than by the nature of the wrong. Researchers should not confuse the judgment name with the cause of action. The underlying wrong is a public nuisance indictment; the judgment of quod prostravit is the abatement remedy that follows conviction or finding.
Third, the term appears in close proximity in the historical dictionaries to other Latin maxims — particularly "quod pure debetur praesenti die debetur" and the maxim from Digest 50.17.203 — because Black's and similar dictionaries organized entries alphabetically by the first word, here "quod." Researchers scanning dictionary columns in historical sources may find these maxims interleaved without clear visual separation, creating a risk of misattribution. The entry for quod prostravit is narrow and self-contained; the surrounding material belongs to entirely different legal principles.
Fourth, the abatement function of this judgment connects it to broader nuisance doctrine research. If you are tracing the history of public nuisance remedies, injunctive relief, or the transition from criminal nuisance indictments to civil enforcement, quod prostravit is a marker of the older common-law enforcement mechanism that civil and statutory abatement procedures eventually displaced.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) define quod prostravit identically as "that he do abate," and both locate it in the context of a judgment upon an indictment for nuisance directing the defendant to abate the nuisance. The definitions are brief and consistent across editions, reflecting a term with a settled, narrow meaning that required little elaboration.
Neither edition elaborates on the procedural mechanics — what follows if the defendant fails to comply with the judgment, how the abatement is enforced, or what categories of nuisance gave rise to this form of judgment. Researchers should not expect the dictionary entries alone to provide procedural depth. Historical treatises on criminal pleading and nuisance law are the appropriate sources for that detail.
The brevity of the entries is itself informative: by the time Black's was compiled, quod prostravit was already a term of historical and reference value rather than active daily use. Its inclusion reflects the dictionary's commitment to cataloging the inherited vocabulary of the common law.
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Jurisdictional Note
Quod prostravit originates in English common law and was carried into American legal practice through the reception of the common law. Its use as a formal judgment designation was never uniform across American jurisdictions, and procedural reforms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rendered the Latin form obsolete in practice. Researchers working in English sources will find more frequent usage than in American materials.
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