Definition
Special terms are peculiar or unusual conditions that a court imposes on a party as a prerequisite to granting relief that lies within the court's discretion — commonly called relief "to the favor of the court." Rather than granting an application outright, the court attaches individualized requirements the moving party must satisfy, either before the relief takes effect or as an ongoing condition of its continuation.
The term operates primarily in procedural and equitable contexts. A court might impose special terms when granting a continuance, issuing a preliminary injunction, allowing an amendment to pleadings, or reinstating a dismissed action. The conditions are "special" in the sense that they are tailored to the circumstances of the particular case rather than arising automatically by rule or statute.
The phrase also appears, more loosely, in contract and commercial law to describe non-standard or negotiated provisions that depart from a form agreement's default language — terms that require separate attention because they modify what would otherwise apply. In this commercial sense, "special terms" are simply the bespoke elements of a deal.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Special" broadly means distinguished from the ordinary or general; a "special term" in everyday speech suggests any condition or clause set apart from standard ones.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Special" denoted that which relates to a particular species, individual, or occasion, as distinguished from what is general or universal.
The gap matters. In ordinary speech, "special terms" merely signals something non-standard, with no implication of judicial authority or conditionality. In its core legal sense, the phrase carries the additional weight of court-imposed obligation: the party does not simply accept unusual conditions — the party must comply with them to obtain relief. A researcher treating the phrase as merely descriptive of unusual contract language will miss its procedural significance entirely.
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Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is ambiguity of context. When the phrase "special terms" appears in historical case law or procedural texts, it almost always carries the court-imposed-conditions meaning. When it appears in transactional documents, treatises on contract drafting, or commercial correspondence, it typically means negotiated or non-standard contractual provisions. These are functionally different concepts, and conflating them distorts both research threads.
In historical sources, "special terms" in the procedural sense appears frequently in equity practice materials — courts of chancery routinely granted injunctions, extensions, and other discretionary relief on special terms. Researchers working in pre-merger equity and law jurisdictions (pre-Federal Rules era in the United States, pre-Judicature Acts era in England) will encounter the phrase most heavily in this context. After procedural merger, the concept persisted but the explicit language became less uniform; courts more often describe specific conditions without labeling them "special terms."
In employment and commercial contract research, "special terms" functions as a drafting signal rather than a legal standard. Employment agreements, supply contracts, and international trade documents frequently distinguish "general terms and conditions" from "special terms" to indicate which provisions govern in case of conflict — typically, special terms control over general ones. This hierarchy has practical significance in contract interpretation disputes.
Corpus connections: The procedural usage connects naturally to research on equitable relief, injunctions, and discretionary judicial power. The commercial usage connects to research on contract formation, the battle of the forms, and international trade documentation including INCOTERMS frameworks.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines special terms as "peculiar or unusual conditions imposed on a party before granting some application to the favor of the court." This definition is compact but accurate for the procedural sense. It captures the two essential features: the conditions are individually imposed (peculiar or unusual, not automatic), and they are prerequisites to discretionary relief (to the favor of the court).
What Black's does not address is the commercial usage, which had developed substantially in transactional practice by the time later editions were published. The dictionary's silence on that usage reflects its focus on judicial and procedural vocabulary rather than contract drafting convention. Researchers should not read that silence as authority that the commercial usage is non-standard — it is simply outside Black's scope for this entry.
No meaningful divergence exists among historical dictionary sources on the procedural definition; the concept was well-settled in equity practice. The evolution worth tracking is the gradual displacement of explicit "special terms" language in court opinions as procedural codes displaced equity practice vocabulary, not any change in the underlying concept.
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Jurisdictional Note
The procedural concept is general to common-law systems, but its practical frequency varies. Courts with robust equitable traditions — federal courts, and state courts in jurisdictions that maintained separate equity practice — invoked special terms most explicitly. In jurisdictions where law and equity merged early, the concept survives but the explicit label appears less consistently. International commercial usage of "special terms" as a contract structural convention is especially prevalent in civil-law-influenced trade documentation and standard-form contracts used in European and Asian commercial practice.
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