Definition
1. (French/Law French) All; whole; entirely. Used as a prefix or component in Law French and Anglo-Norman legal phrases. Appears most frequently in compound expressions carried into English legal texts from the medieval common law: *tout temps prist* ("always ready," a plea of readiness to perform an obligation) and the maxim *tout ce que la loi ne defend pas est permis* ("everything not forbidden by law is permitted"). In this sense, *tout* is not a standalone legal term but a grammatical element within fixed legal phrases.
2. (Common Law Pleading) In the phrase *tout temps prist*, a technical plea in which a defendant in an action on a contract asserts continuous readiness and willingness to perform, used to defeat a claim that the defendant refused or failed to tender performance. The plea traces to common law pleading practice and appears in older English and American authorities discussing tender and readiness to perform.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who aggressively solicits customers, or one who provides supposed inside information on horse racing; also British slang for an informer.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To act as a tout; to ply or seek for customers.
The common English noun and verb — referring to aggressive solicitation or tipping — has no meaningful connection to the Law French term. A researcher encountering *tout* in a historical legal source should not import any sense of solicitation or hawking; the legal usage is purely grammatical, meaning "all" or "entirely," and belongs to the vocabulary of Anglo-Norman pleading, not commercial conduct.
Common Confusion
Researchers unfamiliar with Law French may misread *tout* in legal phrases as an English word and misinterpret the passage entirely. The confusion is compounded because the English verb "to tout" (to promote or solicit) appears in some American regulatory and commercial law contexts — particularly in securities law, where touting a stock or investment has specific regulatory meaning — while the Law French *tout* is a function word with no connection to that usage. These are etymologically unrelated and should be treated as homographs in legal research.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of *tout* lies in recognizing it within compound Law French phrases. Researchers working in older pleading texts, equity reports, or early American common law sources will encounter *tout temps prist* as a plea of tender or readiness; understanding that *tout* simply means "all" or "always" (functioning with *temps*, "time," and *prist*, a form meaning "ready") is necessary to parse the phrase correctly.
Anderson's cross-reference to PARATUS (Latin: ready, prepared) signals the doctrinal connection: *tout temps prist* and *paratus* address the same substantive concept — a party's continuous readiness to perform — through different linguistic traditions. Researchers should cross-check both the Law French and Latin entries when tracing the history of tender pleas.
The maxim *tout ce que la loi ne defend pas est permis* appears occasionally in natural law and constitutional discourse as a statement of the liberty principle. It is structurally similar to the principle articulated in continental legal philosophy and echoed in Blackstone; researchers encountering it in early American constitutional argument should note its rhetorical, not strictly binding, function.
Be alert to the fact that *tout* in legal databases will also surface in entirely unrelated modern regulatory contexts — SEC rules on investment touting, state consumer protection statutes on "touting" products — which share no ancestry with the Law French term. Search strategies should account for this noise.
Historical Dictionary Support
The source dictionaries are in full agreement: *tout* means "all; whole; entirely" in Law French, with Black's (both editions) and Burrill offering essentially identical entries. Burrill traces it to Latin *totus*, which is accurate and useful for understanding cognate terms across the Latin-Law French divide. Anderson adds nothing beyond a cross-reference to PARATUS, which is itself the more substantively developed entry for the pleading concept.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any explanation of the specific phrases in which *tout* operates. Black's lists *tout temps prist* and the maxim without unpacking their doctrinal content. Researchers needing the full pleading mechanics of *tout temps prist* — when the plea lies, what it must allege, how it interacts with tender doctrine — will need to go beyond the dictionary sources to treatises on common law pleading.