Definition
Latin: "He ought not to answer." A formal pleading term designating the prayer, or concluding demand, of a plea in which the defendant asserts that he should not be required to respond to the plaintiff's action at all — not because the plaintiff's claim is substantively wrong, but because the defendant is entitled to a privilege or immunity that removes him from the court's jurisdiction or reach entirely. The phrase names both the defendant's averment (his assertion of privilege) and the specific form of relief he requests: dismissal from the obligation to answer.
The plea containing this prayer is a dilatory plea — it does not contest the merits of the plaintiff's claim but instead challenges the court's power or the plaintiff's right to compel a response. Classic grounds include legislative immunity (a sitting member of Congress, who under the Speech or Debate Clause cannot be questioned in any other place for legislative acts), diplomatic immunity (a foreign ambassador protected by the law of nations), and analogous personal privileges recognized at common law.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a creature of classical common law pleading and will appear in historical sources — particularly English and early American pleading manuals and reported cases — far more than in modern practice. Researchers encountering it in nineteenth-century American court records, pleading precedent books, or treatises should understand it as a technical term of art with a fixed procedural meaning, not a general assertion of innocence or denial.
The most important research trap: the phrase is easily confused with a general demurrer or a plea to the jurisdiction. Respondere non debet is narrower. It is the specific prayer appended to a privilege-based dilatory plea — the defendant is saying he need not answer this plaintiff, in this court, because of who he is, not because the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction generally.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that the pleading world in which this phrase operated — the structured system of common law forms of action with formal prayers concluding each plea — was substantially abolished by the adoption of code pleading in the United States beginning with the New York Field Code of 1848, and later by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938). After those reforms, the phrase drops sharply from American legal writing. Its survival is largely in treatises, pleading manuals, and historical commentary.
The Chitty citation (1 Chit. Pl. *433) appears in both Black's editions and is the primary authoritative source. Joseph Chitty's Treatise on Pleading is a foundational text for understanding the classical system; researchers should treat the Chitty reference as a pointer to the full procedural context surrounding this prayer.
Jurisdictional variation in the underlying privilege doctrine (legislative immunity, diplomatic immunity) remains significant in modern law, but the phrase itself is not the vehicle for asserting those privileges in contemporary practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on all essential points: the Latin meaning, the pleading context, the prayer function, and the exemplary grounds of privilege. Black's first and second editions are nearly identical, with the second edition marginally clearer in specifying "claims a privilege" as the operative condition. Rapalje & Lawrence offers the most concise formulation and usefully frames it as an averment (a positive assertion) rather than merely a request.
None of the historical dictionaries explain the broader procedural mechanics of how the plea was structured, what followed if the plea was allowed or overruled, or how courts evaluated the claimed privilege. For that context, the Chitty reference they all share is indispensable. Researchers relying solely on dictionary definitions will understand the phrase but not the procedure.
The historical sources also do not address the fate of this pleading form under code or notice pleading. That silence is telling: by the time Black's Law Dictionary was first published (1891), the Field Code reforms were already well underway, and respondere non debet was already an archaism in most American jurisdictions, preserved in treatises and legal education more than in active practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The plea as a formal procedural device belongs to the common law pleading system and is not recognized in jurisdictions that have adopted code or notice pleading, which includes all U.S. federal courts and virtually all state courts. The underlying privileges the plea once asserted — legislative and diplomatic immunity — remain fully operative in modern law but are raised through contemporary procedural mechanisms such as motions to dismiss.