Definition
Special sessions are convened meetings of a legislative body, court, or administrative tribunal called outside the regular schedule of meetings, typically for a defined and limited purpose. The term operates in two distinct legal contexts:
1. Legislative special sessions. An extraordinary convening of a legislative body — Congress, a state legislature, or a local council — called by the executive (governor, president, or mayor) or by legislative action when the regular session has ended or is not in progress. The agenda is generally restricted to the subjects specified in the call.
2. Special sessions of justices or courts. In English and early American law, a meeting of two or more justices of the peace convened outside the general quarter sessions for a particular statutory purpose — most commonly the licensing of alehouses, reviewing bastardy orders, or managing highway matters. Such sessions could be convened either by statutory direction or by special summons, but required advance notice to all other magistrates of the division so they could attend if they chose.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "special session" — an extraordinary meeting called for a specific purpose outside normal scheduling.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; the concept tracks general usage of "session" as a sitting or meeting of a body.
The ordinary meaning is close to the legal meaning in the legislative sense, but the historical legal meaning carries additional procedural weight: notice requirements, jurisdictional limits, and the restriction to enumerated purposes are not implied by the plain phrase "special session" as commonly used. A researcher who reads the term in an 18th- or 19th-century English legal document should not assume it refers to a legislative body — it far more often describes a petty or intermediate sitting of magistrates.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Special Petty Sessions (English law): A meeting of magistrates for minor summary matters below the threshold of quarter sessions. Distinct from general petty sessions in that it is convened for a specified object rather than regular business.
Special Sessions for Licensing: The most commonly encountered statutory special session in English law — required by the Licensing Acts for the grant or renewal of alehouse licenses. Required statutory notice to other magistrates.
Legislative Special Sessions: Called by executive proclamation in most American state systems. The governor's call defines the permissible subject matter; legislation outside that scope is subject to constitutional challenge.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is a false friend across time and legal tradition. In modern American legal research, "special session" almost always means a legislative session called outside the regular calendar. In English common law sources and early American materials derived from them, "special sessions" almost always means a magistrates' sitting — a court function, not a legislative one. Researchers working in 18th- or early 19th-century English sources, colonial American records, or early state materials need to identify which institutional context is operative before interpreting a reference to "special sessions."
For legislative research: state constitutional provisions governing special sessions vary considerably in how tightly they restrict the agenda. Whether the governor can expand the call mid-session, whether legislators can introduce matters outside the call, and whether courts will invalidate legislation enacted outside the call are all live questions that turn on specific constitutional text. Historical session laws may not distinguish clearly between regular and special session enactments on the face of the document; researchers should verify through executive proclamations and session records.
For historical court research: the licensing function of English special sessions generated a substantial body of records — recognizances, registers of licensed premises, and appeals to quarter sessions — that are useful for local and social history as well as legal history. Bouvier's entry redirects to SESSIONS generally, which signals that early American law did not always preserve the English subcategory structure with the same precision.
Notice requirements in the English magistrates' context are a procedural trap: a special session convened without proper notice to co-magistrates risked invalidity of everything transacted. This surfaces in reported cases and in practitioners' manuals of the period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary confines its definition to the English law magistrates' context, describing special sessions as meetings of two or more justices of the peace held for a special statutory purpose with notice to other magistrates. The citation to Stone's Justice of the Peace Practice grounds the definition in the practitioner's manual tradition. Black's does not address the legislative meaning, which reflects the predominantly English-common-law orientation of early editions of that work and the fact that legislative special sessions were governed by constitutional text rather than common law doctrine.
Bouvier's entry is a bare cross-reference to SESSIONS, suggesting that early 19th-century American practice had not developed special sessions as a fully independent term of art requiring separate treatment. This is useful negative evidence: it suggests American lawyers of that era treated special sessions as a variant of sessions generally rather than a category with distinct substantive content.
Neither dictionary addresses the modern American constitutional framework for legislative special sessions. Researchers relying solely on these sources for that purpose will find them inadequate and should turn to state constitutional commentaries and legislative practice manuals.
Jurisdictional Note
American state constitutions vary widely in their treatment of legislative special sessions — some grant governors broad discretion to define the call, others restrict both the subjects and the duration. A small number of state constitutions permit the legislature itself to convene a special session by petition or vote without a gubernatorial call. The English magistrates' sense of the term has no direct American constitutional analogue today, though it persisted in some early state court structures.