Definition
Late; not timely; failing to appear, respond, file, or act within a required or expected time. In legal contexts, "tardy" describes a party, pleading, filing, or appearance that arrives after a deadline or scheduled time has passed. The term carries no independent doctrinal weight — it is descriptive rather than a term of art — but it appears in procedural rules, court orders, and judicial opinions as a plain characterization of untimely conduct.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To make tardy; to dawdle. As an adjective (the dominant common form): late, slow, or delayed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Moving with a slow pace or motion; not swift; not being in season; late; dilatory — opposed to prompt. Also, historically: unwary or unready (obsolete); criminal or guilty (obsolete).
The legal use tracks the ordinary adjective closely — both mean simply "late." The researcher's note is this: the obsolete senses flagged by Webster's 1913 (unwary; criminal) have no survival in legal usage. A historical source using "tardy" in a criminal or moral sense is drawing on an archaic register, not a legal term of art.
Common Confusion
"Tardy" is sometimes used interchangeably with "dilatory" in older legal writing, but the terms are not synonymous in precise usage. Dilatory carries the specific implication of intentional delay — and "dilatory plea" is a recognized procedural category. "Tardy" is purely descriptive of lateness without implying intent or bad faith. A filing can be tardy through inadvertence; a dilatory tactic implies deliberate postponement. Researchers encountering "tardy" in older opinions should not read into it any finding of strategic delay unless the text supports that inference.
Why It Matters in Research
"Tardy" is a term that generates more noise than signal in corpus research. Because it is a common English adjective rather than a term of art, it appears across legal writing in casual, descriptive, and procedural contexts without consistency. Researchers searching the Law Mind corpus for "tardy" will encounter it in:
— Procedural contexts: courts describing late filings, untimely objections, tardy appearances, or delayed responses to discovery.
— School and administrative law: "tardy" policies in educational settings generate a distinct body of litigation that has nothing to do with civil procedure.
— Historical moral register: older opinions and treatises occasionally use "tardy" in the sense of sluggish or negligent conduct generally, echoing the Webster's 1913 usage.
The practical trap is assuming "tardy" signals a legal standard. It does not. Whether a tardy filing is excused, waived, or fatal depends entirely on the applicable procedural rule (e.g., rules governing extensions, good cause, excusable neglect) — none of which is contained in the word "tardy" itself. Researchers should treat the term as a pointer to those underlying procedural standards, not as a self-contained legal concept.
Historical corpus searches should also account for the now-obsolete senses. A seventeenth or eighteenth century legal text describing someone as "tardy" in a criminal matter may be using the word in its archaic "guilty" sense — a reading that would be invisible to a modern researcher expecting only the "late" meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary does not provide an independent entry for "tardy." The source material supplied under this heading is unrelated — it concerns intendment after verdict and pleading certainty in indictments, which appears to be a cataloging artifact rather than a substantive entry on this term. No synthesis across the Bouvier corpus is therefore possible for this term.
The absence from Bouvier is itself informative: "tardy" did not achieve the status of a defined legal term in the major historical American law dictionaries. This confirms the structural assessment — the word functions in legal writing as imported ordinary English, not as a term with independent legal definition.