Definition
A sitting of a court conducted by a single judge to hear and decide matters in the first instance, as distinguished from a general term at which multiple judges sit together, typically to hear appeals or consider questions of law en banc. In nineteenth-century New York practice, the special term was the forum for motions and causes of an equitable nature requiring individual judicial attention, while the general term—ordinarily composed of three judges—functioned as the court's appellate or full-bench session.
The term carries a secondary, broader meaning in some jurisdictions and periods: any session of a court convened outside its regular calendar, called to address urgent or specific business that cannot await the next ordinary term.
Common Confusion
SPECIAL TERM vs. GENERAL TERM: These are paired concepts in historical New York practice and should be understood together. A researcher encountering one in a nineteenth-century record will almost certainly need the other. The general term was not simply a "bigger" court—it was a structurally distinct tier, functioning as an intermediate appellate body between the special term and the Court of Appeals. The two terms are sometimes loosely used in older sources to describe any single-judge versus multi-judge distinction, which can mislead researchers applying New York-specific definitions to records from other states.
SPECIAL TERM vs. SPECIAL SESSION: A special session typically refers to a court or legislature convened outside its ordinary schedule by extraordinary call. A special term, by contrast, is a structural division of a court's regular operation—a standing mode of sitting—not necessarily an emergency convening.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in nineteenth-century New York court records will encounter special term and general term constantly, and misreading the distinction distorts the procedural history of a case. An order or decision issued at special term was a first-instance ruling, subject to appeal to the general term before reaching the Court of Appeals. A decision at general term had different precedential weight and represented a different stage of litigation. Failure to track which term issued a ruling can produce errors in reconstructing case timelines or assessing how authoritative a given decision was.
The New York structure was eventually reorganized under the judiciary article reforms of 1894 and further altered by the court reorganization of 1962, which abolished the general term entirely and restructured intermediate appellate review. After those reforms, the phrase special term survives in some New York contexts as a label for particular divisions of the Supreme Court (such as the Special Term for motions), but without the paired general term counterpart. Researchers must be alert to which era's usage they are reading.
Outside New York, the phrase appears with less precise technical meaning. In some states and in federal records, special term simply denotes an extraordinary or non-regular court session. Applying the New York single-judge/multi-judge framework to records from other jurisdictions is a common analytical error.
Because the special term handled equitable matters in New York, equity pleading rules and equity jurisdiction questions are frequently implicated in special term records. Researchers pursuing those records should be prepared to engage with the distinct procedural vocabulary of equity practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement on the core definition: both identify the special term as a single-judge court, both situate it in New York law, and both define it explicitly against the general term as its structural counterpart. Rapalje & Lawrence adds the useful clarification that the general term may also be described as the court sitting "in banc," which connects the special/general distinction to the older common law vocabulary of in banc versus nisi prius sittings.
Neither source addresses the post-reform evolution of the term or its looser usage outside New York. Both entries are brief and descriptive, reflecting that the term was well understood by practitioners of the era and required no extended treatment. The Abbott reference in Black's points to Austin Abbott's practice manuals, which remain a useful primary source for researchers seeking procedural detail on nineteenth-century New York court practice.
What the historical dictionaries do not convey is how thoroughly the New York court structure that gave special term its precise meaning was subsequently dismantled. A researcher relying only on Black's or Rapalje & Lawrence without accounting for that reorganization may incorrectly assume the term retains its historical technical meaning in twentieth- and twenty-first-century New York records.
Jurisdictional Note
The paired special term/general term structure is specific to New York and was not uniformly adopted by other states. Some jurisdictions used similar terminology to mean only that a court session was convened for a special or limited purpose outside the regular term calendar. Federal practice does not employ the term in the New York technical sense.