Definition
A Latin verb meaning "to follow." In legal usage, sequi carries two primary senses:
1. Procedural action: To sue, prosecute, or pursue a legal action. In medieval and early modern English practice, sequi described the act of initiating or continuing a suit — to follow up a cause before a court. The phrase in electione illius qui sequitur means "at the election of him who sues," placing procedural choice in the hands of the pursuing party.
2. Process: To sue out, meaning to obtain or cause the issuance of a writ or other court process. A party who sequitur a writ is the party who procures it from the court and thereby sets judicial machinery in motion.
The term also appears in the maxim sequi debet potentia justitiam, non praecedere — "power ought to follow justice, not go before it" — a principle of jurisprudential ordering found in Coke's Institutes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in standard modern English dictionaries as an English word. Occasionally encountered in academic or ecclesiastical Latin contexts meaning simply "to follow."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed. The root appears in English derivatives such as "sequel," "sequence," and "subsequent."
The gap between ordinary Latin and legal usage is significant. In classical Latin, sequi is simply "to follow" in any sense. In English legal practice, it acquired a precise procedural meaning — to prosecute or to sue — which a reader encountering it in an old writ or pleading would not recover from a Latin dictionary alone.
Common Confusion
Sequi can be confused with related procedural terms in the forms-of-action tradition. A party who sequitur is not merely a passive follower of events but the active initiating or prosecuting party — closer in meaning to "plaintiff" or "suitor" in its procedural context than to any neutral sense of "following." Researchers should also distinguish sequi from the noun sequela (suit, followers of a lord) and from suit in the feudal sense, which share the same Latin root but carry independent legal meanings.
Why It Matters in Research
Sequi surfaces most often in three contexts within a historical corpus: (1) pleading and writ records from the medieval and early modern English courts, where qui sequitur or similar phrases identify the suing party; (2) formulaic recitals in statutes and Year Book reports, where the verb signals the procedural posture of the claimant; and (3) Latin maxims, where it expresses a principle about the relationship between power and justice.
Researchers working in pre-1800 English legal sources should watch for sequitur as a present-tense form ("he follows," i.e., "he sues") and for the participial qui sequitur as a standard way of designating a plaintiff or relator. Burrill's note on the Statute of Westminster II, chapter 18 — in electione illius qui sequitur — is a representative instance of this usage in parliamentary drafting.
The maxim sequi debet potentia justitiam, non praecedere (2 Inst. 454) appears in arguments about prerogative power and judicial authority. It is a jurisprudential rather than procedural usage, but it draws on the same root sense: authority derives its legitimacy by coming after and in service of justice, not by running ahead of it.
Because sequi is a pure Latin verb rather than an anglicized term, it rarely appears in post-1800 common law sources outside historical quotation. Its primary research value is as a key to reading older writs, pleadings, and statutory recitals accurately.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the principal source here, and his entry is characteristically spare but useful. He identifies three distinct applications: the general Latin meaning ("to follow"), the procedural meaning ("to sue; to prefer an action; to prosecute"), and the process-related meaning ("to sue out" — to obtain or issue process). The truncated entry in Burrill — ending mid-sentence with "se" — suggests the original text continued with further illustration, likely involving debt or damages actions, but the available extract does not complete the thought.
No divergence among historical dictionaries can be assessed from the single source provided. Standard historical dictionaries of law Latin (such as Du Cange or Spelman's Glossarium) would be expected to confirm the procedural meanings Burrill identifies, as they are well-attested in Year Book and plea roll Latin.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is navigational guidance for distinguishing sequi from related procedural vocabulary (prosequi, persequi, exsequi) that researchers are likely to encounter nearby in the same sources. Each of these compounds carries a distinct procedural shade — prosequi being the most familiar to modern readers through nolle prosequi — and Burrill does not map the relationships among them.
Jurisdictional Note
As a Latin term of art drawn from the common law's pre-modern procedural vocabulary, sequi is not jurisdiction-specific within the common law tradition. Its practical relevance is confined to historical English sources; American and Commonwealth legal materials after the mid-nineteenth century procedural reforms rarely use the term outside quotation of earlier authorities.