Definition
"Address" carries distinct legal meanings depending on procedural context. The three principal legal senses are:
1. Equity pleading. The part of a bill in equity that identifies the court in which relief is sought — its formal, technical description. The address was a structural component of the bill, distinct from the caption, the stating part, and the prayer for relief. Its function was to orient the pleading to the correct tribunal and invoke that court's jurisdiction.
2. Legislative address. A formal document presented by one or both branches of a legislature to the executive — a governor or head of state — requesting the performance of some executive act. An address of this kind was not a statute; it was a communication between branches, procedurally distinct from a bill or resolution, and without independent legal force unless the executive acted upon it.
3. Place of residence or business. In modern legal usage, "address" most commonly means the physical or registered location associated with a person or entity — used in service of process, contract formation, corporate registration, and statutory notice requirements.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A direction or formal approach to another; a manner of speaking or writing; an amorous advance; a formal petition or appeal to a sovereign or head of state.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To aim or direct; to prepare oneself; to apply one's energies to some object. The noun form carried the sense of directing speech or a document toward someone.
The common and legal meanings share a root — directing something toward a person or institution — but diverge in precision. In ordinary usage, "address" is broad: a speech, a location, a romantic overture. In legal usage, it was a term of art in equity pleading with a fixed function in the structure of a bill, and in legislative procedure it named a specific inter-branch instrument. A researcher encountering "address" in historical equity documents should not assume the modern residential meaning; context determines which sense controls.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
— Address to the court (equity): Structural element of a bill in equity; identifies the tribunal.
— Legislative address: Formal inter-branch communication requesting executive action; distinct from resolutions and bills.
— Address for removal: In some jurisdictions, a legislative address to the executive requesting removal of a judge from office, as an alternative to impeachment.
— Registered address: In corporate and commercial law, the official address designated for service of process and statutory notices.
Why It Matters in Research
The equity pleading sense is now largely obsolete and will appear only in historical materials. Researchers working with chancery records, equity treatises, or older federal and state equity filings should recognize "address" as a term of structural art — not a geographic reference, not a petition to the court, but a specific labeled section of the bill. Conflating it with the prayer for relief or the caption will produce misreadings of pleading structure.
The legislative address sense creates cross-referencing traps. When historical statutes or legislative journals refer to an "address" adopted by the legislature, the researcher must determine whether it is a request to the executive, an expression of legislative sentiment (functionally a concurrent resolution), or — in some jurisdictions — a mechanism for judicial removal. These instruments were not always indexed consistently, and their legal effect varied by state constitution and era.
The judicial removal by address mechanism deserves particular attention: several state constitutions historically permitted removal of judges by legislative address to the governor, bypassing the impeachment process. This appears sporadically in constitutional history and is easily missed when searching only under "impeachment" or "removal."
In modern practice, the locational meaning dominates, but precision matters in service of process disputes, jurisdictional questions tied to domicile, and corporate law contexts where failure to maintain a registered address can have consequences for notice and liability.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's agree on both the equity pleading and legislative senses, with nearly identical language. Bouvier's adds treatise citations (Cooper, Equity Pleading; Story, Equity Pleading) that anchor the equity sense in a well-developed doctrinal tradition. Black's 2nd edition briefly appends "a place of business or residence," acknowledging the emerging modern sense without elaboration — a sign that the residential meaning was already familiar but not yet the dominant legal usage at the time of writing.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law does not appear to have contributed a direct entry on "address" in the excerpted material; the Anderson passage provided concerns "addition" and "additional," which are adjacent but distinct terms.
The historical dictionaries collectively reflect a moment when equity pleading vocabulary still required its own technical glossary. Modern practitioners rarely encounter the bill-in-equity structure at all; the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) effectively merged law and equity and eliminated the formal parts of the equity bill. Researchers should treat the equity pleading sense as historically bounded.
What the historical sources do not address: the registered address in corporate law, statutory notice requirements, and electronic or digital address concepts now embedded in service of process rules and e-commerce statutes. These are modern developments with no counterpart in the classical dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The legislative address mechanism for judicial removal varies significantly by state constitution. Some states retain it; others abolished it in constitutional revisions. Researchers examining judicial tenure and removal history should check the applicable state constitution directly rather than assuming uniformity. In parliamentary systems, "address in reply" carries its own technical meaning distinct from American legislative usage.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Equity Pleading (for the historical bill-in-equity structure and the role of the address as a pleading component); Legislative Process (for the address as an inter-branch instrument and its distinction from bills and resolutions).