Definition
A Latin term of medieval English legal practice meaning "to report" or "to carry back." In the context of early English court procedure, reportare referred to the act of recording or reporting a legal proceeding — most commonly the work of serjeants and legal practitioners who transcribed or noted the arguments, pleadings, and judgments of the royal courts for later reference. The term is the root of the practice that produced the Year Books and, eventually, the formal law reporting tradition in England.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard English entry; the term is Latin and does not appear as an English word in modern general use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. Webster's 1913 does not include reportare as an English entry, consistent with its status as a Latin legal term of art that never passed into ordinary English vocabulary.
Editorial note: Because reportare never crossed into common English usage, there is no gap to bridge between legal and colloquial meaning. The term belongs entirely to the Latin legal vocabulary of medieval English practice.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering reportare in primary sources should recognize it as procedural vocabulary tied to a specific institutional practice — the oral and then written capture of court proceedings — rather than a substantive legal doctrine. A few navigational considerations:
First, the term appears in early English records (Burrill cites Edw. I, membrane 3, dorso) and is most likely to surface in close readings of medieval plea rolls, Year Book manuscripts, or treatises discussing the origins of law reporting. Researchers working in those materials should not conflate the act of reportare with the finished product — the report itself — which may be described by other terms (relatio, narratio, nota).
Second, the Law Mind corpus may contain the term across two distinct registers: (1) Latin legal texts and their transcriptions, where it appears as a verb in procedural descriptions, and (2) secondary historical scholarship on the development of the English common law reporting tradition, where it appears as a term of art being analyzed rather than used. Researchers should apply different interpretive frames depending on which register they are working in.
Third, because the Year Book period predates standardized citation and attribution, identifying who performed the act of reportare in any given proceeding is often uncertain. The question of authorship and reliability in early reports is a live issue in legal history scholarship, and the term itself sits at the center of that debate.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the source dictionaries. The entry is terse: "L. Lat. In old English practice. To report." with a single archival citation to the reign of Edward I. This brevity is itself informative — Burrill does not attempt a definition of what "to report" entailed in practice, suggesting the term was self-evident to his intended audience of nineteenth-century common law practitioners who would have been familiar with the Year Book tradition.
What Burrill leaves unstated, and what historical legal dictionaries generally undertreat, is the transition that reportare reflects: the shift from oral practice in the Aula Regis to a culture of written, semi-systematic case recording. The term thus marks a procedural and epistemic turning point in English legal history, not merely a routine administrative function. Researchers relying solely on Burrill's entry will have the correct translation but an incomplete picture of significance.
Jurisdictional Note
Reportare is a term of exclusively English legal history. It has no operative meaning in American law and does not appear in civil law traditions under the same usage. Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or Continental legal history should not assume the term carries identical institutional meaning, even where Latin legal vocabulary overlaps.