Definition
To throw out a bill is to reject or refuse to act on a formal legal document — most commonly a bill of indictment — at a preliminary stage, before the matter proceeds to trial. The phrase is most closely associated with grand jury practice: when a grand jury declines to find sufficient evidence to return a true bill of indictment, it throws out (or ignores) the bill, effectively ending the prosecution at that stage. The term also appears in legislative contexts, where a deliberative body may throw out a bill by declining to advance it further through the legislative process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To throw out means to discard, reject, or expel something or someone.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To throw out" — to reject; to expel; to cast aside as useless or unfit.
The common meaning of discarding or rejecting something aligns closely enough with the legal usage that little gap exists in basic sense. The distinction that matters for legal research is one of procedure and consequence, not definition: in legal usage, throwing out a bill is a formal act with specific procedural effects — it terminates a prosecution or legislative measure at a defined stage, and is the product of an authorized body (a grand jury or legislative chamber) exercising a recognized institutional function. It is not mere informality.
Common Confusion
Throwing out a bill should not be confused with a nolle prosequi, which is the prosecutor's own decision to abandon a charge. When a grand jury throws out a bill, the rejection comes from the jury itself — it declines to authorize the prosecution in the first place. The prosecutor has not yet secured an indictment; the grand jury has refused to return one. Additionally, in grand jury practice, the specific term of art for the formal refusal to indict is returning a "no bill" or endorsing the bill "ignoramus" (or "not found"). "Throw out a bill" is the vernacular expression for the same act. These terms are often used interchangeably in historical sources, and researchers should not assume they reflect distinct procedures.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase appears most reliably in older English and American legal sources describing grand jury proceedings. Researchers working with nineteenth-century trial records, grand jury reports, or historical criminal procedure materials will encounter it as a synonym for "ignore a bill" or "return a no bill." Bouvier identifies it as English in usage, which is a meaningful flag: American sources may prefer "ignore a bill," "find no bill," or "return ignoramus," while English sources are more likely to use "throw out." A researcher searching Law Mind corpus materials for grand jury rejections should build searches that capture all of these variants — treating them as equivalent expressions of the same procedural outcome.
The phrase also surfaces occasionally in legislative history sources, where a committee or chamber "throws out" a proposed bill by tabling, rejecting, or declining to vote on it. Context will always clarify which sense is operative, but the grand jury usage is the dominant legal meaning in historical legal dictionaries.
Because this is a compound phrase rather than a standalone term of art, it is underrepresented in formal legal treatises. Researchers should not expect to find it as an indexed headword in most sources — it is more likely to appear in passing descriptions of grand jury procedure or parliamentary practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary historical legal dictionary source for this phrase, and his treatment is spare: "To ignore a bill, as a charge or bill of indictment. English." This one-line entry is telling in what it confirms and what it omits. It confirms the grand jury context and the equivalence with "ignore," and it flags the English provenance — suggesting the phrase was recognized in American legal practice largely as a borrowing from English usage. Bouvier does not address the legislative sense, which is consistent with the phrase's dominant association with criminal procedure rather than parliamentary law. No significant divergence appears across historical sources on this point; the scarcity of entries reflects the phrase's status as vernacular description rather than formal legal terminology.