Definition
A procedural act in which a defendant, having already entered a plea, withdraws or abandons that plea and confesses the plaintiff's action. The term is shorthand for the fuller Latin phrase *relicta verificatione*, meaning "the verification being relinquished" — that is, the defendant gives up the right to have the matter tried and verified by a jury. The result is functionally a confession of judgment entered after pleading has already begun, distinguishing it from a cognovit entered before any plea is filed.
Common Confusion
RELICTA and COGNOVIT are closely related and sometimes used interchangeably in older sources, but they are technically distinct. A cognovit is a broader category: a written confession of judgment that a defendant may execute at any point, often before suit is even filed. A relicta is a specific subspecies of cognovit that occurs *after* a plea has been entered — the defendant having initially contested the action then abandons that contest. Burrill treats relicta as "a species of cognovit," which is the correct relationship: all relictas are cognovits, but not all cognovits are relictas. Researchers conflating the two in historical sources may misread procedural timelines.
Why It Matters in Research
Relicta is almost exclusively a term of historical English common law procedure and will appear in pre-twentieth-century sources, particularly those dealing with the formal Latin pleading system. Researchers working in early American court records, colonial-era pleadings, or English common law materials should know that the term signals a specific procedural event: the action has moved past the pleading stage, a plea was entered and then formally withdrawn, and judgment was confessed at that point.
The term will rarely if ever appear in modern American cases or statutes. If encountered in a modern source, it almost certainly appears as a historical reference or in a jurisdiction that preserved older common law forms unusually late. Researchers should not expect to find it in statutory indexes or modern rules of civil procedure.
The connection to *relicta verificatione* as the emphatic words of the old Latin form is important for reading historical court records. Clerks and reporters often abbreviated procedural recitals to their operative Latin phrases, and recognizing *relicta verificatione* as the trigger language for this specific procedural posture can prevent misreading what stage a historical proceeding had reached.
Tidd's *Practice* (cited by Burrill) is the authoritative English procedural treatise for this period and the natural starting point for any deeper research into the mechanics of how relicta operated in practice, including the formal requirements for withdrawing a plea and the timing rules that distinguished it from other forms of confession.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary historical dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and his entry is terse but accurate. He correctly identifies relicta as a subspecies of cognovit, traces it to the Latin form *relicta verificatione*, and cites Tidd's *Practice* as the procedural authority — the standard citation for English common law procedure in the early nineteenth century. The entry is a model of economy: the term had a narrow, technical meaning and Burrill does not overclaim.
What the historical dictionaries collectively do not provide is any account of how American courts received or modified this procedure, or when it fell out of use. The absence is not surprising — relicta was a creature of the formal Latin pleading system, and as American courts moved toward code pleading in the mid-nineteenth century (following the Field Code of 1848 and its imitators), procedures of this kind became obsolete. Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as a window into pre-code practice rather than as describing any living procedural device.
Jurisdictional Note
Relicta as a distinct procedural category was a product of English common law pleading and was carried into American practice only so long as the formal Latin pleading system survived. Its practical relevance is therefore limited to pre-code jurisdictions and historical research. Modern American civil procedure does not recognize relicta as a category, though confession of judgment remains available in many states in modernized statutory form.