Definition
Latin. "According to the form of the statute." A concluding formula used in common law pleading and indictments to indicate that an act, offense, or claim is charged or pleaded in conformity with the requirements of a particular statute. The phrase signaled that the pleader was invoking statutory authority and that the matter before the court was governed by, and should be adjudged under, the terms of the relevant act of Parliament or legislature — not merely under the common law.
In practice, the phrase appeared at the close of a criminal indictment or civil count to assert formal statutory compliance, functioning as a term of art rather than a substantive allegation. Its presence was not merely ornamental: failure to include it where required, or its inclusion where inapplicable, could affect the validity of the pleading.
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Common Language
This is pure legal Latin with no counterpart in ordinary English. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English common law pleading materials — particularly criminal indictments, penal actions, and statutory writs from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries — will encounter this phrase as a terminal formula. Its significance is largely procedural and historical rather than substantive: the phrase marks a pleading as statutory in character, which has downstream implications for how courts historically construed the charge and what defenses were available.
Two research traps are worth flagging. First, the phrase is frequently abbreviated in manuscript and printed records — "sec. form. stat." or simply "s.f.s." — and may be overlooked without awareness of the convention. Second, the phrase's function shifted as common law pleading was reformed. In American jurisdictions that adopted code pleading in the nineteenth century, the formula largely disappeared as a formal requirement; researchers should not expect to find it in post-reform American pleading materials, though it persists in English sources well into the Victorian era.
The phrase also has a minor but well-documented life in legal pedagogy. Blackstone used it as an illustration of Latin's conciseness relative to English — three Latin words doing the work of seven English words — making it a recurring touchstone in commentaries on legal language. Researchers tracing Blackstone's influence or the history of legal Latin in Anglo-American practice may find the passage in 3 Commentaries 323 (and its accompanying note) a useful anchor.
The related civil law formula secundum statutum — noted by Calvinus — indicates that the concept was not confined to English common law but had an analogous expression in learned legal tradition. Researchers working across civil and common law sources should note that the formulas are cognate but not identical in function.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence offer the bare translation without context. Burrill is more instructive: he traces the phrase to Blackstone's Commentaries, specifically to the passage where Blackstone adduces it as evidence of Latin's superiority in brevity, and separately notes the civil law antecedent (secundum statutum) found in Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum. The two dictionary treatments are consistent and complementary rather than divergent.
What neither source addresses is the operational role of the phrase in pleading practice — that is, what it actually required of a pleader and what consequences followed from its omission. That dimension is better pursued in pleading treatises (Chitty on Pleading, Archbold's Criminal Pleading) than in the dictionaries themselves. Both sources also pass over the phrase's gradual obsolescence under code pleading reforms, which is the most practically significant development for a researcher trying to understand why the formula appears in early sources but vanishes from later ones.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is native to English common law pleading and appears most densely in English sources. American courts applying common law pleading forms prior to code reform used comparable statutory conclusion language, but the Latin formula itself is less uniformly present in American materials. Post-Field Code jurisdictions (after 1848) generally dispensed with such formal conclusions altogether.
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