Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "we have given [the power] of receiving an attorney." Tornato recipiendo was a writ or commission issued by the English crown and directed to the judges of a court, authorizing them to receive or admit a named party's attorney — that is, to permit a litigant to appear through legal representation rather than in person. Without such a writ, a party had no recognized right to be represented by an attorney before the court. The instruments were also called letters patent and functioned as the formal mechanism by which the crown granted permission for attorney appearance in a specific proceeding.
Common Confusion
The term is sometimes loosely grouped with general writs of process or writs of summons, but tornato recipiendo was neither. It was not directed at the opposing party or a sheriff; it was directed at the court itself, operating as an authorization to the judges rather than a command to any party. It belongs to a distinct category of crown instruments that regulated the internal administration of court appearance rather than the initiation or service of proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Tornato recipiendo is a marker of a procedural world entirely foreign to modern practice. Today, the right to be represented by counsel is treated as a baseline entitlement, not a privilege requiring royal grant. Encountering this term in historical English legal records — plea rolls, Year Books, early Chancery materials, or the Registrum Brevium — signals that the document or proceeding predates the general recognition of attorney appearance as of right, placing the source in medieval or early modern English practice.
Researchers working with the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig.) will find tornato recipiendo among the form writs catalogued there, which is the primary source Burrill references. The citations to folios 22, 123b, 140b, and 151 of the Reg. Orig. direct researchers to the formulary precedents for this writ, and consulting those folios remains the most direct path to the original Latin forms.
Because the writ was crown-issued, its use also reflects the period when judicial courts were understood as instruments of royal prerogative rather than independent tribunals. The requirement to obtain royal commission before an attorney could be received illuminates the theoretical basis of early English court jurisdiction — courts acted within the scope of what the crown authorized, and attorney admission was no exception.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that this term will not appear in American legal sources. It is exclusively a feature of early English common law practice and has no counterpart in post-colonial American procedure, which absorbed a general right of attorney representation from the outset.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the only substantive treatment of this term among the historical shelf dictionaries. Burrill correctly identifies the Latin construction (a first-person plural perfect passive, indicating a crown grant already made), the directing of the writ to judges rather than parties, and the equivalence with letters patent. His reference to the Registrum Originale as the authoritative source is precise and consistent with the writ's character as a formulary instrument.
The truncation in the available Burrill text — ending mid-sentence at "without them a par[ty]" — strongly implies that the entry continued to explain that without such a commission, a party could not appear through an attorney and was required to appear in person. This is consistent with the broader history of attorney practice in medieval English courts, where personal appearance was the default and representation by another required specific authorization.
No entry for tornato recipiendo appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary, reflecting the term's obsolescence well before American legal lexicography matured. Researchers should not expect to triangulate across multiple historical dictionaries here — Burrill stands alone, and his treatment, though brief, is reliable for the term's core meaning and procedural context.
Jurisdictional Note
Tornato recipiendo is exclusively a historical English common law instrument. It has no equivalent in American, Scottish, or civil law jurisdictions and does not appear in any active legal system. Research relevance is confined to medieval and early modern English legal history.