Definition
A Latin-derived term appearing in early legal writings to denote a report or formal account. The word is a Latinized construction used in medieval and early modern legal texts to describe the recording or relaying of proceedings, decisions, or official accounts. It does not correspond to a term of art in modern legal practice and is encountered today almost exclusively in historical sources and manuscript studies.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English legal manuscripts, Year Books, or pre-modern treatise literature may encounter *reportus* as a variant form where a modern editor would simply read "report." The word signals a particular register of late medieval or early modern legal Latin — the so-called "barbarous Latin" that mixed vernacular legal convention with classical forms. Awareness of the term prevents misreading or misindexing when transcribing or searching manuscript sources.
The more important navigational point is the substitution pattern: Lord Coke, a foundational authority whose writings saturate the Law Mind corpus, preferred *relatio* for the same concept rather than *reportus*. When tracking concepts across the Coke materials — particularly the prefatory matter to the Reports — researchers should search under *relatio*, not *reportus*. The two words functioned as rough equivalents in context, but Coke's deliberate preference for *relatio* reflects his humanist resistance to debased Latin forms. This stylistic choice has downstream effects: later writers who follow Coke's usage will not employ *reportus*, while writers working in a more purely formulaic or clerical tradition may.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source to record this term, and Burrill's entry is itself notably spare. He cites Spelman's *Glossarium Archaiologicum* as the lexicographic authority for the word while observing, with evident agreement, that Spelman characterized it as "barbarous" — meaning not classical Latin but a functional coinage of legal practice. Burrill then cross-references Lord Coke's use of *relatio* at the preface to the eighth volume of the Reports as the more authoritative alternative.
No other major historical law dictionaries in the standard reference canon — not Jacob, not Tomlin, not Bouvier — include *reportus* as a headword. This absence is itself informative: the term was peripheral even in its own era, recognized by lexicographers of historical forms rather than practicing lawyers. Its appearance in Burrill reflects his unusually broad engagement with the archaic and Latinized layers of the common law vocabulary. Researchers should treat *reportus* as a documented but marginal form rather than a term with settled legal content.