Definition
Without day means that a proceeding, court session, or legislative body has been adjourned or dismissed with no future date fixed for reconvening. It signals either a final, permanent end to the matter or an indefinite suspension with no scheduled return. The Latin equivalent, sine die, carries the same meaning and appears far more frequently in modern legal usage.
In historical pleading practice, when a defendant prevailed on a plea, the court's judgment was often that the defendant "go without day" or "go quit without day" — meaning the defendant was discharged from further attendance and freed from the action with no continuation to any future date. Depending on the procedural posture (such as a nonsuit versus a substantive disposition), this either terminated the action entirely or suspended it indefinitely.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Without a day being fixed for reconvening.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry — the phrase does not appear as a standard English expression outside legal contexts.
The common and legal definitions here are nearly identical in surface meaning, but the legal usage carries significant weight that the plain reading conceals. "Without day" in historical pleading was not merely descriptive of scheduling — it was a term of art embedded in the formal judgment, signaling specific legal consequences about whether a party was discharged from liability, whether the action was extinguished, or merely paused. A researcher encountering "go without day" in an old record cannot treat it simply as an adjournment note.
Common Confusion
Without day and sine die are functionally synonymous and should be treated as interchangeable in research. The confusion worth flagging is between a without-day adjournment (which may be final) and an ordinary continuance or recess (which carries a return date). Modern sources frequently use sine die exclusively, which can cause researchers working with older English-language records to miss the connection. Additionally, the historical pleading formula "go without day" carried a substantive judgment meaning distinct from a mere scheduling adjournment — conflating the two produces misreadings of old court records.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter without day most often in one of two contexts: old common-law pleading records, and legislative history.
In pleading records, the phrase appears as part of formal judgment language — "that the defendant go without day," "that the plaintiff take nothing and the defendant go hence without day." The specific wording signals the procedural outcome: discharge, dismissal, or nonsuit. Because the legal consequences varied depending on which party went without day and why, researchers cannot treat all such entries as equivalent. A defendant going without day after a successful plea in abatement had different consequences than one going without day after judgment on the merits.
In legislative history, a chamber adjourning without day (sine die) has adjourned the session finally. Bills not enacted die with the session. This matters for statutory research when tracing whether a bill lapsed, was carried over, or was re-introduced. Many researchers searching for a statute's failure assume it was voted down; adjournment without day is a quieter and easily missed mechanism of legislative death.
The phrase drops off sharply in modern court filings, where "dismissed" or "adjourned sine die" has replaced it. Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century materials — particularly colonial, early federal, and English common law records — will encounter it far more frequently and must read it with its historical pleading context intact.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in strong agreement on the core meaning: an adjournment or discharge with no future day fixed. Bouvier and both editions of Black present essentially identical definitions focused on indefinite adjournment and the legislative context. Burrill anchors the Latin equivalent clearly: sine die, sans jour.
Rapalje & Lawrence provides the most useful supplementary dimension, explaining the pleading judgment formula and noting the critical distinction that the consequences of going "without day" varied by procedural context. This is the element the other dictionaries understate. Bouvier's observation — that when a case is adjourned without day, "it is not again to be inquired into" — captures the finality implication, but leaves researchers without guidance on the cases (like nonsuit) where that finality was not absolute.
None of the historical dictionaries adequately address the transition away from this terminology in modern practice, nor do they flag that researchers may encounter the phrase embedded in docket entries or judgment rolls without any surrounding explanation.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase appears across common-law jurisdictions — English, American state, and federal — but its pleading-context usage is most concentrated in records predating the twentieth century. American courts replaced much of the old pleading vocabulary after the Field Code reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and the subsequent adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938. English records retain the phrase longer. Legislative use of sine die continues uniformly across U.S. jurisdictions to the present.