Definition
A Latin reporting phrase meaning "but by the court." It appears in case reports to introduce a statement or holding made by the full court, typically in one of two situations: (1) where the court, during argument, contradicts or qualifies a proposition advanced by counsel; or (2) where the opinion of the whole court differs from the opinion of a single judge immediately preceding it in the report.
The phrase functions as a signal to the reader that what follows represents the collective voice of the court, not the view of an individual justice or the position of a party's advocate. It is a structural device of legal reporting, not a term of substantive law.
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Common Language
This term has no meaningful counterpart in ordinary English. It is pure Latin legal reporting shorthand with no common usage outside of legal literature. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
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Common Confusion
SED PER CURIAM vs. PER CURIAM: These phrases are related but distinct. Per curiam ("by the court") is the modern, still-current term used when an opinion is issued in the name of the court collectively rather than attributed to a named author. Sed per curiam is an older reporting convention that specifically signals a correction or contrast — the "sed" (meaning "but") is load-bearing. It marks a pivot away from what counsel argued or what a single judge said, and toward what the court as a whole determined. Modern reports have largely dropped sed per curiam in favor of per curiam, which has shed the adversative connotation. A researcher treating the two as interchangeable will misread the rhetorical and procedural posture of older reports.
SED PER CURIAM vs. QUAERE: Some older reports use quaere to signal judicial doubt or a question left open. Sed per curiam, by contrast, signals a definitive correction. Both appear in similar typographic positions in historical reports, but they carry opposite weight: one marks certainty by the court, the other marks uncertainty.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English and early American case reports from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries will encounter sed per curiam regularly. Its function is entirely structural and interpretive — it tells you how to weight what follows relative to what came before.
The critical navigational point: when you see sed per curiam, the material immediately preceding it was either counsel's argument or a single judge's remark, and the court is now stepping in to correct, qualify, or replace it. The passage introduced by sed per curiam is the authoritative statement, not what came before. Misreading the sequence — treating the preceding judicial or counsel statement as the holding — is a genuine research trap in older reports.
This phrase is almost exclusively a feature of historical English reports and early American reporters that followed English conventions. It has essentially disappeared from modern reporting. Researchers working with annotated reports, digests, or headnote systems built from these older reporters should also be aware that compilers sometimes condensed sed per curiam passages without preserving the adversative structure, which can flatten the distinction between counsel's position and the court's correction.
The phrase also illuminates the mechanics of early appellate practice, where oral argument interplay between bench and bar was reported more narratively, and the court's interjections during argument were themselves treated as significant legal data. The modern clean separation between argument and opinion was not the norm.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the leanest entry — a translation and a single citation to 2 P. Wms. 24, 25 (Peere Williams' Chancery Reports) — which correctly situates the phrase in its natural habitat of English equity reporting.
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary agree on the core definition and the two functional contexts. The second edition's entry is the cleaner of the two; the first edition's entry appears to have suffered a printing or OCR artifact that runs sed per curiam into unrelated material on sedition, which should be disregarded as a textual corruption.
None of the three historical sources explores the interpretive implications of the "sed" — the adversative force of the phrase — in any depth. They treat it as a definitional curiosity rather than a research tool. A researcher relying only on these dictionary entries risks understanding the phrase as merely synonymous with per curiam, missing the contrastive signal that "but" carries in practice.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is rooted in English legal reporting conventions and appears most heavily in English common law and equity reports through the nineteenth century. American reporters adopted it in the early national period before gradually abandoning it. It is not a term of current procedural significance in any U.S. or English jurisdiction.
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