Definition
Latin: "as I heard." A notation used by early English law reporters to signal that a case or legal proposition was recorded not from the reporter's own direct observation or reading of the record, but from oral report — that is, secondhand. The phrase functions as an epistemic disclaimer, alerting the reader that the authority cited carries less certainty than a case the reporter personally observed or transcribed.
Common Language
The phrase is Latin and has no meaningful common English usage. It is pure law Latin of the early reporter tradition and appears almost exclusively in pre-modern legal sources. No entry in Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 is applicable.
Why It Matters in Research
Ut audivi is a reliability marker embedded in the early English case reports, and researchers working in the pre-modern common law corpus must recognize it as a signal to treat the surrounding authority with caution. Its significance is threefold.
First, it flags secondhand transmission. When a reporter such as those behind the Year Books, Dyer, or the early nominate reporters appended ut audivi to a case or proposition, they were acknowledging that the material reached them by word of mouth rather than by direct attendance at argument or judgment. This matters because early reports were never uniform in reliability, and the presence of the phrase places a specific case or point in the lowest tier of reporter confidence.
Second, it has no modern equivalent in official reporting. Modern law reporters do not use epistemic qualifiers of this kind — official reports are understood to derive from authoritative records. Encountering ut audivi therefore immediately identifies the source as belonging to the manuscript or early print era of English law, roughly before the mid-eighteenth century rationalization of law reporting.
Third, researchers citing or tracing cases marked ut audivi in the Law Mind historical corpus should expect that the case may be unverifiable, may represent a garbled oral transmission, or may not appear in other parallel report series. Cross-checking against Dyer's Reports, Freeman's Reports, Bunbury's Reports (the Exchequer), and the Year Books — all of which are referenced in the Burrill entry — is advisable before treating such authority as settled.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the only shelf source in the Law Mind corpus to define this term directly. Burrill's entry is brief but precise: "As I heard. Freem. 5, 19. Bunb. 165. Dyer, 30 b. A reporter's note." The cited reports — Freeman, Bunbury, and Dyer — are all early English nominate reporters, and the citations confirm that the phrase appeared across multiple report series rather than being idiosyncratic to a single reporter's practice.
No other Law Mind historical dictionary (Black's, Bouvier's, Wharton's, or Tomlin's) appears to carry a standalone entry for this phrase, which reflects its status as a technical notation of the early reports rather than a term of substantive doctrine. Burrill, whose dictionary draws heavily on civil law and Latin legal phrases, is the natural home for this entry and likely the most complete treatment available in the standard reference shelf.
The phrase belongs to a family of similar reporter notations — including ut dicitur ("as it is said") and quaere ("query") — that performed analogous epistemic functions in early case reporting. Researchers should treat these as part of a coherent vocabulary of qualification used by pre-modern reporters to signal gradations of certainty.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the tradition of early English common law reporting. It has no parallel in civil law jurisdictions or in American legal practice, where the nominate reporter tradition that gave rise to such notations did not develop in the same form.