Definition
A Latin term meaning "it is recalled." In English legal practice, revocatur is the formal expression used when a court annuls or sets aside a judgment on the ground of error in fact — as distinguished from error in law, which calls for the term reversed. The term functioned as a term of art in the judgment itself or in the record, signaling the precise procedural and legal basis for the annulment.
Common Confusion
REVOCATUR vs. REVERSED: The distinction is not merely stylistic. Revocatur applied when the defect rendering the judgment void or voidable was factual — such as a party's death before judgment, a disability that was not known to the court, or fraud on the record. Reversed applied when the error was one of law apparent from the record. In English practice, these were not interchangeable. A researcher encountering one term where the other was expected should treat the difference as a substantive clue about the nature of the underlying error and the procedural vehicle used to correct it.
Why It Matters in Research
Revocatur is a term almost entirely confined to historical English practice and will appear primarily in older English reporters, Year Books, and treatises on common law procedure. American courts adopted it only selectively and inconsistently, and it largely fell out of use as procedural codes displaced the common law writ system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The key research trap is treating revocatur and reversed as synonyms when reading historical English decisions or abridgments. They are not. If a case record states that a judgment was revocatur, the researcher should investigate the factual basis of the annulment — a plea of coram nobis or its equivalent is the likely procedural vehicle. If the record says reversed, look for an assigned error of law. Conflating the two will lead to misreading the procedural history of a case.
In American sources, the term appears sporadically in nineteenth-century treatises and digests that drew heavily on English common law, but American courts rarely used it as a formal term of art. Researchers working in American materials from the Founding era through the mid-nineteenth century may encounter it, but should not assume the English fact/law distinction was being applied with the same precision.
This term is also relevant when researching the writ of coram nobis or coram vobis, which were the common law mechanisms for bringing errors of fact to the attention of the court. Understanding revocatur helps map the relationship between the underlying writ and the court's resulting action.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence agree precisely on the core meaning and the fact/law distinction. The definitions across all three sources are essentially identical: revocatur signals annulment for factual error, while reversal signals correction for legal error. There is no divergence worth noting.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context about how frequently or consistently English courts actually employed the term in practice, or whether its use varied by court (King's Bench versus Common Pleas, for instance). Researchers needing that depth should consult treatises on English common law procedure — Tidd's Practice and Stephen's Pleading are the standard reference points for this period.
Jurisdictional Note
Revocatur is a term of English common law practice with no meaningful American statutory or codified analog. American jurisdictions that abolished or substantially reformed common law pleading and procedure in the nineteenth century effectively rendered the term obsolete in domestic practice. It persists in American legal writing primarily as a historical reference.