Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "let right be done to the party." In English law, this was the formal endorsement written by the monarch — or by the Lord Chancellor on the monarch's behalf — upon a petition of right, signaling royal consent to allow the petitioner to pursue a legal remedy against the Crown. The phrase functioned as the operative approval that transformed a petition of right from a mere supplication into an actionable proceeding. Without it, the petition could not proceed to adjudication.
Common Language
This phrase has no meaningful existence outside legal and historical contexts. It is Law French — the archaic Anglo-Norman legal dialect that dominated English legal practice from the Norman Conquest through roughly the seventeenth century — and carries no independent common usage in English. No Wiktionary or Webster's entry applies. The section is omitted accordingly.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical sources are almost always working with materials relating to the petition of right, the procedural mechanism by which a subject could bring a legal claim against the Crown before sovereign immunity doctrine was formally modified or abrogated by statute. The phrase appears in records of proceedings in English courts and in parliamentary documents from the medieval period through the late nineteenth century, when the Petition of Right Act 1860 and later the Crown Proceedings Act 1947 ultimately restructured the framework for suing the Crown in England.
Several research traps are worth flagging. First, the phrase is routinely abbreviated or rendered inconsistently in manuscript and printed sources — variations in spelling are common given the instability of Law French orthography. Researchers should not expect uniform spelling across sources. Second, the phrase is easily confused with the petition of right as a constitutional document (Magna Carta lineage, the Petition of Right 1628) rather than as the procedural instrument it describes here. The petition of right as a procedural vehicle is a distinct concept from the constitutional petition of that name, and conflating them is a persistent error in both primary and secondary sources. Third, American researchers should note that the petition of right procedure never transplanted into American law in any meaningful way; sovereign immunity in the United States developed along a separate doctrinal track. References to this phrase in American legal literature are therefore almost exclusively historical or comparative.
Within the Law Mind corpus, this term connects most directly to materials on Crown proceedings, sovereign immunity, and the history of equity jurisdiction. It also surfaces in discussions of royal prerogative and the constitutional relationship between subject and Crown in English legal history.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's are in complete agreement, essentially tracking the same definition word for word: "Let right be done to the party. A phrase written on a petition of right, and subscribed by the king." This convergence is unremarkable given that both dictionaries drew heavily on common English law sources and the phrase is functionally undisputed in meaning. Neither dictionary elaborates on the procedural mechanics or historical development of the petition of right procedure itself, which limits their utility for researchers needing contextual depth. Bouvier's entry appears truncated — the "See" notation at the close suggests a cross-reference that was either dropped or points to a companion entry not reproduced here. Researchers using Bouvier's should check for a substantive entry under PETITION OF RIGHT for the fuller treatment.
Both dictionaries treat this as a historical artifact of English law, which is accurate. Neither attempts to extend it to American practice, correctly so.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase and the procedure it accompanied are exclusively English in origin and application. American law never adopted the petition of right procedure; claims against the federal and state governments in the United States are governed by sovereign immunity doctrine and its statutory exceptions, developed independently.