Definition
"Soit fait comme il est desire" is a Law French phrase meaning "Let it be as it is desired." It is the formal words of royal assent given to private acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. When the sovereign — or the Lords Commissioners acting on the sovereign's behalf — assents to a private bill, this phrase is pronounced to signal that the bill has received royal approval and becomes law as enacted.
The phrase functions as an operative formula rather than a substantive legal rule. It carries no independent legal effect beyond its ceremonial and constitutional role as the mechanism by which private legislation is perfected.
Common Confusion
"Soit fait comme il est desire" should not be confused with "Le Roy le veult" (or "La Reyne le veult"), the corresponding formula of royal assent applied to public bills. The distinction matters for research: private acts of Parliament govern specific individuals, corporations, or localities, and their enactment history is traced through different archival channels than public general legislation. Researchers who encounter one formula in a historical record should not assume the other applies or that the underlying legislation is of the same character.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears almost exclusively in British constitutional and parliamentary history materials, and its practical significance to a researcher is almost entirely historical. A few research traps are worth noting.
First, the formula surfaces in records of private acts from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, and sometimes into the twentieth. Because private acts were enrolled separately from public statutes, researchers tracing the legislative history of a specific private act — such as one incorporating a company, authorizing an enclosure, or granting a personal right — need to look beyond the standard printed statute volumes. The presence of this formula in a parliamentary record is a signal that the document being examined is part of private, not public, legislative history.
Second, the Law French of this phrase connects it to a body of parliamentary formulas that remained in ceremonial use long after Law French had otherwise disappeared from English legal practice. The other royal assent formulas — including "Le Roy s'avisera" for bills withheld and "Soit baille aux seigneurs" for bills returned — operate as a set. Encountering this phrase without familiarity with the full set of formulas can cause a researcher to misread the procedural posture of a historical bill.
Third, for researchers working in colonial or Commonwealth legal history, variants of British parliamentary ceremony — including royal assent procedures — were transplanted into colonial legislatures with varying degrees of fidelity. The presence or absence of formal assent language in colonial legislative records is often a diagnostic clue about the nature of local legislative authority and its relationship to imperial supervision.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the standard entry: "Soit fait comme il est desire. L. Fr. Let it be as it is desired. The royal assent to private acts of parliament." The entry is brief because the term admits of no ambiguity and serves a single, narrow function.
Historical legal dictionaries generally treated this phrase as part of a family of parliamentary formulas requiring collective knowledge to be useful. Black's identifies it accurately, but the compressed entry does not alert the researcher to the distinction between private and public assent formulas or to the archival implications of encountering the phrase in original sources. No significant disagreement exists among historical sources on the meaning of the phrase itself.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Royal Assent; Private Acts of Parliament; Parliamentary Procedure (Historical)