Definition
Latin: "in the time of." Used in legal citation and court reporting to indicate that a decision, record, or case collection dates from the period when a particular judge or official held office. Most commonly encountered in the form "temp." or "t." preceding a judge's name in case reporters and citation shorthand — for example, "Cases temp. Holt" or "Cases tempore Hardwicke" refers to a volume collecting decisions rendered during the tenure of the named judge.
The term does not carry substantive legal meaning on its own. It is a locating device: it tells the researcher when something happened by reference to who held authority at the time, rather than by calendar date.
Common Confusion
Tempore is sometimes conflated with the phrase pro tempore (often shortened to "pro tem"), which means "for the time being" — a designation for someone acting temporarily in an official capacity. The two phrases are related in origin but serve distinct functions. Tempore locates a historical moment by reference to an officeholder's tenure; pro tempore designates a temporary substitute currently exercising a role. A judge pro tempore is filling in; cases tempore [Judge X] were decided during that judge's regular tenure. Researchers encountering "temp." in an old citation should not assume it means "temporary" in the modern administrative sense.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of tempore is as a citation key to pre-modern English and early American case reporters. Before standardized official reporting systems, case collections were frequently organized by the presiding judge's tenure rather than by year or court term. A citation that reads only "temp. Talbot" or "Cases tempore King" gives no calendar date on its face — the researcher must know which judge bore that name, when that judge served, and which reporter compiled the relevant volume.
Several of these tempore reporters exist in multiple editions with inconsistent pagination, and some were compiled posthumously or from unofficial notes, making source reliability uneven. When Law Mind's corpus includes references to cases from English equity or King's Bench reports organized this way, cross-checking the reporter's identity against standard tables of abbreviations (such as those found in Raistrick's Index to Legal Citations and Abbreviations or Bieber's Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations) is essential before treating a tempore citation as verified.
For American researchers: tempore citations appear most frequently in early federal and state decisions that quoted or relied on English precedent. Encountering "temp. Holt" in an 1810 American opinion signals that the court was drawing on King's Bench authority from roughly 1689–1710. Understanding that temporal anchor helps assess both the weight of the authority and its procedural or doctrinal context.
The term also appears, less commonly, in administrative and legislative contexts — "tempore" may appear in records of legislative sessions or colonial proceedings to indicate action taken during a particular session or under a particular presiding officer. Context governs interpretation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's agree on the core definition: tempore means "in the time of" and functions chiefly as a citation locator. The first edition illustrates the usage with a specific reference — "Cases tempore Holt" — and cites Wallace's Reports for confirmation, grounding the definition in actual reporter practice rather than abstract Latin construction. The second edition's entry for tempore is fragmentary in the source material provided, trailing into unrelated content about temporary receivers and temporary statutes, which suggests the corpus excerpt captures a page break rather than a separate definition. Neither edition elaborates beyond the citation function, which accurately reflects the term's narrow, instrumental role in legal literature.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the interpretive complexity that arises when tempore reporters conflict with each other or with other contemporaneous sources — a practical problem that any researcher working in early English equity reports will encounter. Black's treats tempore as a solved question of Latin translation; the harder work lies in reporter identification and verification.