Definition
Latin phrase meaning "we being willing" or "we being desirous." In historical English legal practice, *volentes* functioned as the opening word of Latin writs of certiorari, signaling the sovereign's or court's expressed willingness to be informed of a matter pending below. The full formulaic phrase ran: *Volentes de certis causis certiorari* — "we being willing for certain causes to be certified." The term is not a substantive legal concept in itself but a grammatical and procedural marker within the formal writ structure of the old common law pleading system.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): *Volentes* is the present participle plural of the Latin verb *velle*, meaning "those who are willing" or "willing persons." It appears in phrases like *volenti non fit injuria*.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as a standalone term. Latin participial forms were broadly understood by educated English speakers in the nineteenth century as denoting a willing or consenting party.
The gap here is directional rather than definitional. In ordinary Latin and in the doctrinal phrase *volenti non fit injuria*, *volentes* refers to consenting individuals — a private, personal posture. In writ practice, the term had an entirely different grammatical subject: the sovereign or issuing court. It was a first-person plural expression of official will, not a description of a private party's consent.
Common Confusion
Researchers encountering *volentes* in old writ texts may reflexively connect it to *volenti non fit injuria* ("to a willing person no injury is done"), the tort doctrine governing voluntary assumption of risk. The two usages share a Latin root and a general semantic field of willingness, but they are unrelated in application. *Volenti non fit injuria* concerns the consent of a private party to a risk; *volentes* in writ practice concerns the expressed will of the issuing authority. Conflating them produces a category error — one is substantive doctrine, the other is procedural formula.
Why It Matters in Research
*Volentes* is a term researchers encounter almost exclusively in transcriptions or reproductions of Latin writ forms from English common law practice predating the procedural reforms of the nineteenth century. Its significance is navigational: recognizing *volentes* as the incipit of a certiorari writ helps a researcher identify document type, date range, and procedural posture without needing to parse the full Latin text.
A few traps to flag. First, writ incipits were sometimes used as shorthand names for the writs themselves in legal registers and practice manuals — knowing that *volentes* opens the certiorari writ allows a researcher to connect fragmentary references in old registers to their full procedural context. Second, Burrill's citation to the *Registrum Omnium Brevium* (Reg. Orig. 169b) and Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium* (F. N. B. 247) locates this usage firmly in the manuscript and early printed writ register tradition. Researchers working in that corpus should treat *volentes* as a filing and identification key, not as a term of art carrying independent doctrinal weight. Third, after the abolition of Latin pleading in England (Common Law Procedure Act 1852 and subsequent reforms) and the displacement of the writ system more broadly, *volentes* disappeared from living practice. It survives only in historical legal literature, writ registries, and scholarly commentary on pre-reform procedure.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is concise and accurate. Burrill correctly identifies *volentes* as a procedural incipit, provides the full Latin phrase, translates it faithfully, and anchors it to the two standard reference works for old English writ practice: the *Registrum Omnium Brevium* and Fitzherbert's *Natura Brevium*. No substantive divergence exists across historical sources because the term's function was purely formal — it carried no contested doctrinal content that would generate competing definitions.
What historical dictionaries uniformly omit is any guidance on the term's research utility: they record the writ formula without explaining how a modern or historical researcher would use *volentes* as a finding or identification tool within a large corpus of legal documents. That gap is filled above.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English common law writ practice and carries no independent meaning in American, Scottish, or continental legal systems. American courts adopted certiorari as a procedural mechanism but shed the Latin writ formulas in the process. Researchers in American legal history will not encounter *volentes* in domestic sources.