Definition
A non-juridical day — a day on which courts are not open for business and on which judicial proceedings may not lawfully be conducted. The term derives from Latin legal practice and designates days excluded from the ordinary running of court calendars, deadlines, and procedural time computations. Examples historically recognized as ridicus days include Sundays, Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter in England, and the Fourth of July and, in some jurisdictions, the first of January in the United States.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical procedural materials — particularly English common law practice manuals and early American civil procedure sources — will encounter ridicus as a technical term for what modern practice calls a "non-judicial day" or "legal holiday." The practical stakes are significant: time-computation rules have long excluded non-juridical days from the count of days for filing deadlines, service of process, and the return of writs. A researcher tracing the ancestry of modern court holiday rules, deadline-computation provisions, or holiday statutes should recognize ridicus as the Latin placeholder for this concept in older sources.
The term does not appear in modern American legal vocabulary. Contemporary federal and state rules use "legal holiday," "non-judicial day," or simply "holiday" in deadline-computation statutes and court rules. The functional concept, however, survives intact: days on which courts are closed are generally excluded from or treated specially in procedural time calculations. When reading pre-twentieth-century practice manuals, writs, or procedural treatises, the researcher should map ridicus directly onto this modern framework.
Burrill's cross-reference to Chitty's General Practice (3 Chitt. Gen. Pr. 104, 107) points toward the English common law procedural tradition as the primary context for this term. Wharton's Lexicon entry under "Holiday" provides a parallel common law treatment. Researchers consulting either source will find ridicus embedded in discussions of term days, return days, and the calculation of process intervals — all areas where the identity of non-juridical days has direct operational consequence.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical legal dictionary source available for this term, and its entry is concise and functional: ridicus is a Latin legal term meaning a non-court day, illustrated by reference to recognized English holidays and their American analogues. Burrill situates the term firmly in procedural practice rather than substantive law.
No divergence among sources can be assessed given the single-source record, but the concept itself is well-grounded in the classical Latin legal tradition. The term reflects the formal Latin vocabulary that dominated English legal practice writing through at least the eighteenth century. Burrill's treatment is consistent with how Chitty and Wharton handle the underlying concept of non-juridical days, even though those sources do not prominently feature the Latin term itself.
What historical sources do not address: the modern proliferation of federally and state-designated legal holidays, the treatment of court closures due to emergency or administrative order, and the interaction of non-judicial day rules with electronic filing systems — all of which have substantially expanded and complicated the concept's practical scope since Burrill's era.
Jurisdictional Note
The specific days recognized as ridicus or non-juridical days varied between English and American jurisdictions even in the historical period, as Burrill notes. Modern variation is extensive: each state designates its own legal holidays by statute, and federal courts follow the federal holiday calendar under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Researchers should not assume that any particular day treated as non-juridical in one jurisdiction transfers automatically to another.