Definition
To abridge means to reduce, curtail, or cut short — with the precise legal meaning varying by context:
1. In constitutional and civil rights law: To abridge means to curtail, restrict, or diminish a right or privilege. The term appears in this sense in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech") and the Fourteenth Amendment. Here, abridgment does not require complete elimination of a right; a law that meaningfully reduces the practical exercise of a right may constitute an abridgment.
2. In copyright law: To abridge means to condense a work by preserving its substance and essence in shorter form. Abridgment requires the exercise of independent mental labor — the author selects, reorganizes, and reduces. This distinguishes abridgment from mere extraction or quotation, which copies language without condensing it. A true abridgment was historically treated as a distinct work eligible for its own copyright protection.
3. In historical practice (old real actions): To abridge a plaint or declaration meant to reduce it in substance — not merely in words — by severing or withdrawing part of the claim. A plaintiff who abridged a plaint in a real action struck out a portion of the demand and asked the court to require the opposing party to answer only the remainder. This usage is obsolete.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To make shorter; to shorten in duration or extent; to condense by using fewer words while retaining the sense; to curtail.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To make shorter; to shorten in duration; to lessen or diminish; to condense written language while retaining the sense.
The common meaning is familiar and largely accurate as far as it goes, but it understates what is legally at stake in two directions. In constitutional law, abridge carries a specific threshold significance — something less than outright prohibition may still be an unconstitutional abridgment. In copyright law, the historical legal meaning of abridgment was more technically demanding than ordinary condensation: it required a judgment about preserved substance, not just shortened form, and that distinction determined whether a new copyright could arise.
Common Confusion
Abridge vs. Abrogate: These terms are sometimes conflated. To abridge a right is to diminish or restrict it; to abrogate is to annul or abolish it entirely. An abridgment may be partial; abrogation is total. In constitutional analysis, courts evaluate whether a law abridges a protected right even if the right still exists in some form.
Abridgment (copyright) vs. Infringement: A lawful abridgment was historically a permissible form of use that could generate independent copyright protection. Unlawful copying without the required condensation or original mental labor was infringement. The line between a protected abridgment and an infringing copy was contested in early copyright cases.
Why It Matters in Research
The single term abridge operates in at least three distinct legal registers — constitutional, copyright, and obsolete procedural — and conflating them produces research errors.
For constitutional research, the key question is always what threshold of restriction qualifies as an abridgment. Researchers tracing First or Fourteenth Amendment doctrine must distinguish between cases addressing outright prohibition, significant restriction, and incidental burden. Historical sources will use abridge in this technical sense without explaining the threshold; modern doctrine has refined it considerably.
For copyright research, the abridgment doctrine is largely a historical phenomenon. Under early English and American copyright law, a lawful abridgment was understood to be a new and original work. This meant that compiling a condensed version of a protected work could be both a permitted use and a separately copyrightable product — a doctrine that modern fair use analysis has absorbed and substantially transformed. Researchers using 18th or 19th century copyright materials must understand that abridgment occupied a distinct doctrinal category that no longer exists in that form.
For historical procedural research, abridgment of a plaint appears in treatises on old real actions and will not be encountered in post-common-law-procedure sources. The Burrill and Bouvier entries are useful guides here; modern Black's does not develop this usage.
A practical trap: Corpus searches on abridge or abridgment without filtering by context will return results from all three registers. A researcher working on First Amendment doctrine may surface significant noise from copyright cases, and vice versa.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries show reasonable agreement on the copyright meaning and the old practice meaning, with differences in emphasis.
Black's (both editions) leads with the copyright sense and draws the abridgment/extraction distinction explicitly: abridgment preserves the substance and requires mental labor; mere extraction does not condense and therefore is not an abridgment. This is the most practically useful formulation for copyright research.
Burrill emphasizes the old practice meaning with characteristic attention to etymology and distinguishes the legal sense from the popular one: in practice, to abridge was to subtract substance, not merely to shorten words. This is a useful corrective — it shows that the procedural meaning was, if anything, the inverse of the common meaning, where abridging typically means reducing language while keeping substance.
Bouvier covers both the procedural and copyright senses and situates the practice usage in real actions specifically. His treatment of the plaint abridgment with reference to writ forms (de libero tenemento, assize, dower) confirms this as a narrow, form-specific procedural device.
None of the historical dictionaries develops the constitutional dimension of abridge in any depth. The constitutional usage is the dominant modern legal sense, yet it receives no entry in any of the shelf sources — a significant gap for modern researchers relying on historical dictionary authority alone.
Jurisdictional Note
The constitutional meaning of abridge is federal in origin, rooted in the text of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but state constitutional provisions often use identical or parallel language and have generated their own bodies of abridgment doctrine. State courts interpreting free speech provisions sometimes apply more protective standards than the federal floor; a researcher must not assume federal abridgment doctrine maps directly onto state constitutional analysis.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Abridgment (Copyright); Freedom of Speech (Constitutional); Real Actions (Historical Procedure)