Definition
A Latin term from Roman and civil law with two distinct senses:
1. (Procedural) To sit, as a court or the judges composing a court — describing the formal act of a tribunal being convened and in session. The term captures the physical and institutional reality that courts "sit" to exercise jurisdiction; a court that is not sitting is not in session and cannot act.
2. (Civil law) To be satisfactory or acceptable to a judge — to meet with a judge's approval. In this sense, *sedere* describes the judge's assent to a proposition, argument, or course of action placed before the court. The phrase *si hoc judici sederit* (if this be approved by the judge) appears in the Digest and illustrates this usage.
Common Confusion
The two meanings of *sedere* are easy to conflate in historical sources, but they operate in different contexts. The first (to sit) is procedural and institutional, describing the court's status. The second (to be satisfactory) is evaluative, describing a judge's disposition toward a matter. Researchers encountering the term in a medieval English source are almost certainly dealing with the first meaning; those encountering it in a civilian or Digest context should consider the second.
Why It Matters in Research
*Sedere* is a term researchers are most likely to encounter not in isolation but embedded in Latin phrases that appear throughout medieval English legal records, Year Books, and civil law texts. Recognizing the root is essential for parsing compound terms and related phrases correctly.
The procedural sense — to sit — is the ancestor of a cluster of terms that appear throughout Law Mind's corpus: *sedente curia* (while the court is sitting), *sessio* (session), and the English word "session" itself. When early common law sources, including Bracton, use *residere* where later authors would use *sedere*, the terms are functionally equivalent but the variation signals different manuscript traditions and can affect dating and attribution questions.
The civil law sense — to be satisfactory — is narrower and appears primarily in Digest-based materials. Researchers working in ecclesiastical law, admiralty, or early equity sources, where civilian influence ran deep, may encounter this usage. The Digest citation (*Dig. 2.8.7.2*) is genuine and traceable, which means researchers can verify the usage in context rather than relying on secondary characterization alone.
Burrill notes that Bracton uses *residere* rather than *sedere* — a small but useful flag. If you are cross-referencing Bracton's text with later civilian commentary and find the terms apparently synonymous, they are; but the variation is worth noting as a marker of Bracton's Latinity and his relationship to the civilian tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only entry among the shelf sources. It is concise and accurate, identifying both meanings and supplying the Digest reference. Burrill correctly distinguishes the two senses — the institutional (courts sitting) and the evaluative (judicial approval) — without conflating them. The note that Bracton uses *residere* is a characteristically useful Burrill observation: it tells the researcher something about the evolution of legal Latin in England without overstating it.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the way *sedere* functions as a root for derivative terms that appear far more frequently in legal sources than the bare root itself. A researcher who encounters *sedere* in isolation should treat the entry as a gateway to related terminology rather than an endpoint.
Jurisdictional Note
The procedural sense of *sedere* — courts sitting — carried into English common law usage and persists in modern terminology (courts "sit," judges "sit" on a bench or panel). The civil law sense of judicial approval is largely confined to civilian jurisdictions and historical sources influenced by Roman law, including ecclesiastical courts and early equity practice in England.