Definition
A Latin term meaning "forthwith" or "immediately." In legal usage, statim does not necessarily mean this instant or without any interval — rather, it denotes action taken within a legally sufficient time: the period that permits all required legal formalities and accompanying steps to be properly completed. The term appears primarily in old English law and in legal instruments, writs, and procedural texts predating modern codification.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not a standard entry in modern English; recognized only in legal and classical Latin contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word; treated as a Latin term meaning "immediately" or "at once."
Editorial note: The instinct to read statim as demanding instantaneous action is a natural one for a reader of Latin, and it is the persistent trap in legal sources. Historical legal usage carved out a measured meaning that ordinary Latin does not signal: "immediately" as a legal term of art tolerated the time genuinely necessary to act lawfully, not the literal moment of obligation arising.
Common Confusion
Statim is easily conflated with terms like forthwith, instanter, and sine mora, all of which communicate urgency or immediacy but carry subtly different procedural weights depending on the source, period, and jurisdiction. Forthwith in English legal usage has similarly been interpreted to mean "with reasonable promptness under the circumstances" rather than literally at once. Researchers should not assume that statim, forthwith, and instanter are interchangeable in a historical document — the choice of term may have been deliberate and its precise meaning may depend on the procedural rule or instrument at issue.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap with statim is its dual register: literal Latin and technical legal term. A researcher reading an old writ, plea roll, or procedural treatise must resist translating statim as "instantly" and instead ask what the governing legal framework required as a sufficient interval. Burrill's entry is the most instructive of the shelf sources on this point, noting that statim was understood not so much as actual time but as effectual and lawful time — the time that permitted all legal adjuncts and accompaniments of an act.
The term appears most heavily in pre-modern English procedural materials, particularly in writ practice and common law pleading. Researchers working in those areas will encounter it in Latin-language entries on plea rolls and in treatises such as Hale's History of the Common Law (referenced in Burrill's note). It is essentially absent from modern statutory and case law as an operative term, having been displaced by English equivalents — but it surfaces in historical transcription, quotation, and commentary, where misreading it can distort the procedural significance of the passage.
Jurisdictional variation is not a meaningful concern for this term in its operative sense; it belongs to the Latin procedural vocabulary of English common law and traveled with that tradition to American courts only as a historical artifact, not as a working term of modern practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) are in agreement, offering identical substance: statim means forthwith or immediately, with the qualification that in old English law it meant either "at once" or "within a legal time, i.e., such time as permitted the legal and regular performance of the act in question." Both editions are concise and accurate but give the researcher little to work with beyond the bare distinction.
Burrill's entry is richer and more useful. Burrill explicates the interpretive principle behind the term — that statim was understood not in terms of actual time but of effectual and lawful time, meaning a period sufficient to permit all the legal accompaniments of an act. Burrill also gestures toward Hale's History of the Common Law as authority, which is the appropriate primary source for researchers who need to pursue this distinction further. The truncated state of Burrill's entry in the available text (cut off mid-sentence) suggests additional commentary was present in the original that the surviving excerpt does not capture.
None of the historical dictionary sources quotes a specific writ or plea roll to anchor the term in practice, which is a limitation. Researchers needing concrete examples of statim in use will need to go directly to primary sources — medieval writ collections, Year Books, or the plea roll literature — rather than relying on the dictionary shelf alone.