Definition
A Latin term meaning "as at another time" or "as heretofore." In English common law procedure, sicut alias referred to a second writ issued when the first writ of the same kind had been returned unexecuted — that is, when the sheriff or other officer had failed to carry out the command of the original writ. The phrase served as a formal signal within the writ's text that this instrument was not the first of its kind, but a repetition of a prior command that had gone unfulfilled.
The sicut alias writ was part of a graduated series of process. If the second writ also went unexecuted, a third writ — the sicut pluries ("as many times before") — would follow. Together, these successive writs formed the escalating procedural mechanism by which courts compelled compliance before moving to more severe remedies such as capias or outlawry.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century common law pleading records, court rolls, or writ registers will encounter sicut alias as a formulaic term embedded in the body of the writ itself, not typically as a standalone heading. Its presence tells you something procedurally important: the matter was already before the court, a prior writ had issued and failed, and the party seeking relief had returned to court for renewed process. This can affect how you reconstruct litigation timelines from archival records.
The term appears across writ practice in debt, detinue, capias, and other personal actions. When reading historical plea rolls or year books, identifying a sicut alias writ signals that you are not looking at the commencement of an action but at a continuation — the original writ is somewhere earlier in the record or has been lost. Failure to recognize this can lead to a miscounting of procedural steps or a misreading of the litigation's stage.
The graduated writ series (original → sicut alias → sicut pluries → capias → outlawry, in various forms depending on the action and period) is an essential structural feature of common law civil procedure through the abolition of the forms of action. Researchers tracing process in English ecclesiastical courts, chancery, or early American colonial courts may also encounter the term, though usage and the specific series of writs varied by jurisdiction and court.
Because the forms of action were abolished in England by the Common Law Procedure Acts of the mid-nineteenth century and in American federal practice by the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, sicut alias belongs almost entirely to historical legal research. It has no operational significance in modern litigation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement: all three define sicut alias identically as "as at another time, or heretofore" and identify it as a second writ issued when the first was not executed. All three cite Cowell — that is, John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607), the early English legal dictionary — as the authority. This unanimity reflects the term's narrow, stable, and purely technical character; there was never significant doctrinal debate about its meaning.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is the procedural context that makes the term intelligible: the place of sicut alias within the graduated writ series, its relationship to sicut pluries as the next step, or the downstream consequences of repeated non-execution. Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries will understand the literal meaning but may not grasp why the writ series mattered or how to use that knowledge when working with primary sources.
Rapalje & Lawrence appends, without clear separation, the maxim sicut natura nil facit per saltum, ita nec lex (as nature does nothing by a leap, so neither does the law), attributed to Coke's Littleton. This maxim is substantively unrelated to sicut alias and appears to be an artifact of alphabetical proximity in that dictionary's layout. Researchers should not treat it as connected doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Sicut alias writ practice was primarily an English common law phenomenon and was carried into early American colonial and state court practice. The specific writ series and procedural rules governing successive writs varied by court, period, and colony or state, and did not uniformly replicate English practice in every detail.