Venue

Neighborhood; place; lo- ' cality. Particularly, the neighborhood, place, or county in which a crime or an injury is alleged to have been committed or a fact alleged to have happened. The name venue is also applied to the clause in a declaration stating the county in which a fact happened; as in the expression to lay a venue, meaning to allege a place. It also designates the county in which an action is intended to be tried. A change of venue is a change of the place of trial to another county. Under the codes of procedm-e, the expression " place of trial " has been very generally substituted for venue. In former times, the direction to the sheriff was to summon a jury, not from the body of the county, but from the immediate neighborhood where the facts occurred, and from among those persons who best knew the truth of the matter; the jurors being formerly regarded as witnesses, or as persons in some measure cognizant, of their own knowledge, of the matter in dispute and of the credit to be given to the parties; and, in order to know into what county the retdre facias should issue, it was necessary that the issue in the action, and the pleadings out of which it arose, should show particularly what that place or neighborhood was. Such place was called the visne or venue; and the statement of it in the pleadings obtained the same name; to allege the place being, in the language of pleading, to lay the venue.

Mozley Sr W

By the judicature act, there is to be no local venue for the trial of any action, but when the plaintiff proposes to have the action tried elsewhere than in Middlesex, he is in his statement of claim to name the county or place in which he proposes that the action shall be tried; and the action thereupon shall, unless the judge otherwise orders, be tried in the county or place so named.

Brown.