Definition
A Law French phrase meaning "let it be as it is desired." The formal words of royal assent to a private act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. When the sovereign, acting through the Clerk of the Parliaments, pronounced or recorded this formula upon a private bill, the bill received royal assent and became law. The phrase is the private-bill counterpart to "Le Roy le veult" (for public bills) and represents the constitutional moment at which parliamentary legislation becomes operative.
Common Confusion
SOIT FAIT COMME IL EST DÉSIRÉ is specific to private acts of Parliament — legislation affecting named individuals, corporations, or localities rather than the general public. Researchers should not conflate it with "Le Roy le veult" (the assent formula for public bills) or "La Reyne le veult" (its feminine equivalent during a queen's reign). The distinction between private and public bill assent formulas matters when tracing the legal status of historical legislation, since private acts were often enrolled separately and may be harder to locate in standard statutory compilations.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with British constitutional procedure and parliamentary history. Researchers working in early American legal materials or colonial-era sources may encounter references to private acts of Parliament whose validity depended on this assent formula, particularly in property, charter, and incorporation disputes that carried over into post-Revolutionary American courts.
The phrase is a reliable marker of a private act, not a public statute. When you encounter this formula in historical records, it signals that the legislation in question was not of general application — a distinction that affected how courts treated such acts as evidence, whether they required judicial notice, and how they were pleaded. At common law, courts did not take judicial notice of private acts; they had to be specially pleaded and proved. Researchers examining colonial charters, private estate bills, or early corporate charters should be alert to this procedural consequence.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is terse and contains what appears to be a partial transcription artifact: the entry begins with "SIRE.-Let it be as it is desired," which likely reflects a typesetting or alphabetization anomaly in the original dictionary rather than a separate headword. The substantive content — royal assent to private acts — is the operative definition and should be read as the full entry for this phrase.
Because this is a term of British parliamentary procedure, it has no direct American statutory or constitutional analog. Post-Independence American legislatures developed their own assent procedures, and the Law French formulas fell entirely out of use in the United States. Researchers encountering the phrase in American sources will find it almost entirely in historical legal dictionaries, treatises on parliamentary law, or in pleadings and proceedings that reference pre-Independence private acts of Parliament.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide the only entry among standard American legal dictionaries. Their definition — "let it be as it is desired; the royal assent to private acts of parliament" — is accurate and complete as far as it goes, but the extreme brevity leaves several research-relevant points unstated: the contrast with public bill assent formulas, the pleading consequences of private-act status, and the historical context of Law French in parliamentary procedure.
Older English legal dictionaries and treatises on parliamentary practice (such as Hatsell's Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons) provide fuller treatment of the assent formulas, but these sources are outside the standard American legal dictionary shelf. Researchers needing depth on this term should look to parliamentary procedure treatises rather than American legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase is a term of British parliamentary procedure with no operative significance in any American jurisdiction after Independence. Its relevance in American legal research is historical only — confined to questions about the validity or interpretation of pre-1776 private acts of Parliament that may bear on colonial-era grants, charters, or rights.