Definition
A Latin term appearing in English legal records as the name of a clause inserted to document the court's delivery of a writ to a deputy sheriff for execution. The soiendum clause formally recorded that a justice of the court, during the current term, had delivered a writ to the appropriate officer of the county to be executed in due form of law. It functioned as an official notation within the record itself, establishing that process had been issued and placed in the hands of the proper executing officer.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with medieval and early modern English court records — particularly plea rolls, common law records, and related process documentation — may encounter the soiendum clause as a formulaic component of the record that signals the stage of proceedings at which a writ passed from the court to the sheriff's office. Its presence indicates that the matter had progressed beyond issuance of a writ to active delivery for execution, which can be a meaningful procedural marker when tracing the course of litigation in historical records.
The term is almost entirely absent from modern legal usage and from American law. Researchers should not expect to find it in domestic sources; it belongs to the technical vocabulary of English common law record-keeping and is relevant primarily to those working with primary sources from English courts prior to procedural modernization. The term does not appear in later editions of Black's and carries no continuing doctrinal significance.
Because soiendum is a clause name rather than a substantive legal concept, it will not appear as a subject heading in indexes or digests. Researchers are more likely to encounter it embedded within a transcription or description of a historical record and may need to recognize it on sight without the benefit of contextual labeling.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the sole entry in the Law Mind corpus. The definition is compact and functional: soiendum is identified as English law terminology, the clause is quoted in substance, and the source is attributed to Lee's Dictionary under "Record." The entry does not elaborate on the procedural context or the frequency of the clause's appearance, and no other historical dictionary in the corpus addresses the term. Given the narrowness of the term's application — a named clause within a specific record-keeping tradition — the absence of broader treatment is unsurprising. Nothing in the single available source is contradicted by other materials; there is simply no competing authority to compare.
Jurisdictional Note
Soiendum is a term of English common law record practice with no recognized presence in American or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers outside the context of English legal history are unlikely to encounter it in operative legal materials.