Definition
The formal sessions or periods during which a court is convened and conducts its business. The term carries two principal meanings in legal usage:
1. Sittings in banc (en banc). A court sitting in its full and formal constitution, before all of its judges together, as distinguished from a single judge sitting alone. This is the court assembled with complete authority to hear matters of law, render judgments, and exercise its plenary jurisdiction.
2. Sittings at nisi prius. The holding of a trial court session by one or more judges of a superior court, conducting jury trials and hearing evidence outside of the banc context. In English practice, superior court judges would travel on circuit to hold sittings at nisi prius rather than requiring all business to come before the full court at Westminster.
The term is the plural of SITTING, and in practice the two are often used interchangeably, though SITTINGS more commonly refers to a scheduled period or series of court sessions.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "sitting" — occasions or periods of being seated, or sessions of a deliberative body.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A seat or a session; the time during which one sits, as in "a sitting of the legislature."
The gap between common and legal usage is modest but real. In ordinary English, "sittings" is unremarkable — any session of any body counts. In legal usage, particularly in historical English and Commonwealth sources, SITTINGS carries a precise procedural meaning tied to the formal constitution of the court and the type of jurisdiction being exercised. The distinction between a sitting in banc and a sitting at nisi prius was not merely descriptive but determined which judges were present, what business could be conducted, and what rules applied.
Common Confusion
SITTINGS should not be confused with TERMS. In earlier English and American practice, the court year was divided into TERMS — fixed periods established by law or rule during which courts were considered open and capable of acting. SITTINGS were the actual working sessions held within a term. A court might have a Michaelmas Term but hold its sittings only during specified weeks within it. Modern practice has largely collapsed this distinction, replacing both terms and sittings with continuous calendars, which makes the older usage a source of confusion when reading historical sources.
SITTINGS IN BANC should also be distinguished from sittings in chambers. Banc sittings involve the full court in formal session; chambers business is conducted by a single judge informally and does not carry the same institutional weight.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical legal materials — particularly English common law sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and early American materials that borrowed from English practice — will encounter SITTINGS as a term of precision, not just description. The distinction between banc and nisi prius sittings determined the procedural posture of a case and the composition of the deciding tribunal. Misreading a reference to "sittings" as merely meaning "when court was open" risks misunderstanding which judges were acting, in what capacity, and with what authority.
In Commonwealth jurisdictions, the term remains active in procedural rules governing court calendars. Canadian and Australian court rules, for example, still schedule formal "sittings" with defined start dates. A researcher moving between U.S. and Commonwealth sources should not assume the term has been fully modernized in non-American materials.
The corpus connection to NISI PRIUS is important: many treatises discussing sittings at nisi prius assume familiarity with the circuit system and the role of assize judges. Burrill's citation to Stephens' Commentaries is the most useful anchor for understanding the structural logic of the term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st Ed.) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in close agreement, both drawing on Stephen's Commentaries (3 Steph. Com. 422–423) and presenting the same two-part definition: sittings in banc and sittings at nisi prius. This convergence suggests the definition was well-settled by the mid-nineteenth century and that both sources were working from the same English procedural tradition.
Black's 2nd Edition entry appears to be a corrupted or truncated reproduction of the 1st Edition entry, with an anomalous fragment ("Escheat") suggesting a printing or digitization error. Researchers should treat the 2nd Edition entry for this term as unreliable and defer to the 1st Edition and Burrill's.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry provided under this term is plainly misattributed — it describes the ecclesiastical distinction between rectors and vicars and has no apparent connection to SITTINGS. This is likely an indexing or transcription error in the source material. It should be disregarded for purposes of this entry.
None of the historical dictionaries address the modern collapse of the term-and-sittings structure or offer guidance for researchers working in contemporary American practice, where the term has largely fallen out of formal procedural vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
In American federal practice, the formal distinction between sittings in banc and nisi prius sittings has been substantially absorbed into modern rules of civil and criminal procedure. The term survives most actively in Commonwealth jurisdictions — England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand — where court calendars are still formally organized around scheduled sittings. Researchers should be alert to this divergence when reading across jurisdictions.