Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "let right be done to the party." It is the formal endorsement or warrant issued by the English crown directing that justice be done to a subject who has petitioned the sovereign for relief. Historically, the phrase functioned as the royal signification authorizing the courts to proceed on a petition of right — the procedural mechanism by which a subject could seek redress against the Crown for wrongs such as wrongful detention of land, money, or goods belonging to the petitioner.
The endorsement was not itself a judgment but rather the Crown's consent to allow the petition to be heard, transforming what would otherwise be a grace-based royal discretion into a justiciable proceeding before a court of law or equity. Without this fiat, the petition of right could not advance.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears almost exclusively in historical English legal sources relating to petitions of right, a remedy that has no direct modern American counterpart and that was substantially transformed even in English law by the Petition of Right Act 1860 and later the Crown Proceedings Act 1947. Researchers encountering this phrase in older English case reports, chancery records, or colonial-era documents should understand it as a procedural marker signaling that the Crown has consented to suit — a consent that was, in earlier periods, genuinely discretionary rather than automatic.
The phrase is a reliable indicator that the surrounding document concerns a petition of right proceeding, not an ordinary action at law. Its presence in historical records helps distinguish Crown-consent proceedings from other forms of royal writs or prerogative instruments. Researchers working in colonial American records should be cautious: while the petition of right was theoretically available in colonial contexts as a matter of English constitutional inheritance, the endorsement formula itself was rarely replicated with precision outside England proper, and American courts after independence developed substitute mechanisms for suits against the sovereign under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
Because this term is purely procedural and formulaic, it will not appear in American statutory compilations or modern case reporters. Research value is confined to English legal history, the history of sovereign immunity, and the pre-modern law of the Crown.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define the phrase accurately as the endorsement on a petition of right signifying royal consent to let right be done to the petitioner. The entry is brief and descriptive, consistent with the purely technical character of the phrase. No meaningful divergence exists among the historical dictionary sources that treat it, as the phrase is fixed in form and its function was well settled in English practice long before the period covered by most legal dictionaries.
What historical sources tend to understate is the significance of the endorsement as a constitutional moment: the Crown's act of writing soit droit fait al partie (the phrase appears in variant spellings across sources, including al partie and el parte) was not a formality but the linchpin of the entire proceeding. Blackstone's Commentaries and older treatise writers illuminate this constitutional dimension more fully than the dictionary entries alone convey.
Note on spelling: the phrase appears in variant forms across historical sources — soit droit fait al partie, soit droit fait al party, and the present headword's el parte — reflecting the degraded and inconsistent state of Law French orthography in English legal usage. Researchers should search variant spellings when working in manuscript or early print sources.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase has no operative legal force in any American jurisdiction and is not part of modern English law following the Crown Proceedings Act 1947, which replaced the petition of right with ordinary civil proceedings against the Crown. Its relevance is strictly historical and comparative.