Definition
A Latin pleading formula meaning "and this he prays may be inquired of by the country." Tur per patriam is the concluding phrase of a plaintiff's pleading at common law when the plaintiff tenders an issue of fact to be tried by jury. The phrase signals the plaintiff's formal request that the disputed matter be submitted to a jury — "the country" — for determination. It appears at the close of a declaration or replication where the plaintiff joins issue and invokes trial by jury rather than trial by the court on a question of law.
The phrase is a term of art in common law pleading procedure and has no operative significance in modern practice, where jury demands are governed by rule rather than formal pleading language.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in common law pleading materials — especially records from English common law courts or early American state and federal practice predating the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century — will encounter this phrase as a routine closing formula in plaintiff's pleadings. Its presence signals that the issue tendered is one of fact, not law, and that the pleader has formally demanded jury trial under the traditional rules of issue joinder.
The phrase is the plaintiff's counterpart to the defendant's corresponding jury-demand formula. A researcher who encounters tur per patriam in a pleading record should understand that the substantive dispute has narrowed to a specific factual issue — the pleadings have reached the point of joinder — and that what follows in the record will be the jury proceeding or its equivalent.
Modern practitioners and researchers unfamiliar with common law pleading forms may overlook or misread this formula as mere boilerplate without understanding that its presence signals a specific procedural posture: the case has passed through all stages of pleading and arrived at an issue of fact ready for trial. Absence of the formula, or substitution of a law-side formula, can signal important differences in procedural history.
The corpus materials in which this phrase appears are primarily pre-code pleading records, form books, and pleading treatises. Researchers consulting early nineteenth-century American pleading manuals or English common law precedent books will find the phrase used in model forms and annotated as a standard requirement for proper issue tender.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary agree closely on the substance, both defining the phrase as "And this he prays may be inquired of by the country," and both identifying it as the conclusion of a plaintiff's pleading tendering an issue to the country. Burrill provides an additional citation (1 Show. 181) alongside the shared citation to 1 Salk. 6, offering slightly more source support.
Neither dictionary elaborates on the procedural mechanics surrounding the formula, its relationship to issue joinder doctrine, or how courts treated defective or missing conclusions. Both treat the entry as a brief translation and identification rather than a doctrinal explanation — appropriate for a formulaic phrase but potentially insufficient for researchers who need to understand the broader procedural context in which the formula operated. The note in both dictionaries that the phrase is "literally translated in the modern forms" reflects the transition period during which English-language equivalents were substituted for Latin formulae in pleading, a reform that preceded but anticipated the more sweeping abolition of formal pleading under code procedure.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs to the tradition of English common law pleading and carried over into early American practice in courts of law (as distinguished from equity). With the adoption of code pleading beginning in the mid-nineteenth century — first in New York (1848) and spreading to most American jurisdictions — formal Latin pleading conclusions including tur per patriam were abolished as requirements. Federal practice under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) completed this displacement. The phrase retains relevance only in historical legal research.