Definition
In civil law and old English pleading, replicare means to reply — specifically, the plaintiff's act of answering or responding to the defendant's plea or exception. The term names the procedural step by which a plaintiff, having filed a declaration and received the defendant's defensive pleading, returns a further response in order to contest or avoid what the defendant has alleged. The noun form of this act is the replication.
Replicare thus describes a moment within the formal sequence of common law and civil law pleading: declaration → plea → replication → rejoinder, and so on. It belongs to the vocabulary of issue-joinder, the technical process by which successive responsive pleadings narrow the dispute to a single contested point of fact or law.
Common Language
This is pure legal and procedural Latin with no meaningful counterpart in ordinary modern English. The root sense — "to fold back" or "to unfold again" — is preserved only in specialist usage. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted.
Common Confusion
Replicare (the verb) and replication (the noun) are companion terms and not meaningfully distinct in substance, but researchers should not conflate either with the modern procedural concept of a "reply brief" or "reply pleading" under contemporary civil rules. The formal pleading sequence in which replicare operated — with its strict alternating exchanges culminating in an issue — was abolished in most common law jurisdictions by the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century. What survives under names like "reply" in modern practice is a simpler, more permissive instrument than what replicare historically designated.
Why It Matters in Research
Replicare appears almost exclusively in sources predating the procedural reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Researchers working in early English common law records, equity proceedings, or civil law materials will encounter the term as part of a rigid pleading architecture that no longer exists in its original form. Several navigational points matter:
First, the term signals procedural posture. When a record or treatise states that a party did or did not replicare — or that the right to replicate had not yet attached — it is locating the dispute within the pleading sequence. Understanding where replicare falls in that sequence (after the plea, before the rejoinder) is essential for reading older case materials accurately.
Second, the limiting phrase querens replicationem non habet — the plaintiff has not yet the replication — found in Bracton and reproduced in Burrill, indicates that the right to reply was not automatic or immediate. It could be withheld or suspended by procedural conditions. Researchers finding this language in early materials should recognize it as a technical statement about procedural timing, not a substantive holding.
Third, because the pleading reforms of the 1830s–1870s in England and the United States replaced formal issue-joinder with notice pleading or code pleading, later dictionaries and encyclopedias may treat replicare as a purely historical artifact. It will not appear in materials discussing modern procedure. Cross-period research — especially in American states that retained older pleading forms longer than others — requires care about which procedural regime was operative at the relevant time.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in complete agreement on the core definition: replicare means to reply, specifically to answer a defendant's plea in civil law and old English pleading contexts. Black's (both editions) offers the definition in its sparest form. Burrill adds the most substantive material, tracing the word's construction from re and plicare (to fold back), and quoting directly from Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae to illustrate the procedural right's conditionality.
Burrill's etymology — that the term is "so called because it unfolds and lays open" — is a genuine explanatory contribution: replication in this tradition was understood not merely as a response but as an act of disclosure, laying open the plaintiff's answer to the defendant's exception. This framing is absent from Black's and is worth noting for researchers interpreting the conceptual weight the term carried in civilian and early common law writing.
None of the source dictionaries situates replicare within the full pleading sequence or explains the moment of its abolition. Researchers should not assume, from these entries alone, that the term has any living procedural application.
Jurisdictional Note
Replicare and its noun form replication were used in both English common law courts and in jurisdictions following the civil law tradition. American states varied in how long they retained formal pleading sequences; some code pleading states effectively extinguished the concept by the 1850s, while equity practice in certain jurisdictions preserved elements of the old pleading structure somewhat longer.