Definition
A Latin phrase from old English legal records meaning "simple justice" or "plain justice." The term functioned as a descriptive title applied to a puisne justice — that is, a junior or associate judge sitting below a chief justice on the same court. The designation distinguished ordinary members of the judicial bench from the presiding or senior judicial officer.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-modern English legal records, writs, and administrative documents, and is unlikely to surface in modern legal research outside of historical scholarship. Researchers encountering the phrase in old rolls, plea books, or chancery records should recognize it as a judicial title, not a substantive legal standard or doctrine. The term signals the rank of the judge referenced, which can be material when tracing the authority or jurisdiction of a particular court proceeding.
The principal trap for researchers is mistaking "simplex" as modifying the nature of the justice being administered — as if the proceeding were somehow simplified or informal — rather than recognizing it as a rank designation. The phrase describes the person, not the proceeding.
Because the term draws its meaning from the broader vocabulary of puisne judicial rank, researchers should follow the trail to sources addressing the English court hierarchy in its historical form. Entries in old plea rolls that name a simplex justitiarius are telling you who presided, not what kind of case was heard.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on this term, which is unsurprising given that both entries trace directly to Cowell's Interpreter — the early seventeenth-century English law dictionary that served as a foundational reference for both works. The entries are nearly verbatim, and neither source expands beyond the bare identification of the term as a synonym for puisne justice found in old records.
What historical sources do not address is any systematic account of when or how frequently the term was actually used, in which courts it appeared, or across what period of English legal history it was current. Researchers should treat this as a narrow identifying gloss rather than a richly documented term. The absence of elaboration across two major historical legal dictionaries is itself informative: this phrase was already archaic and specialized by the time Black's and Burrill's were compiled, surviving only as a curiosity from old record-keeping practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to historical English law and English court records. It has no recognized application in American law and does not appear in any functional legal context outside of historical documentary research.