Definition
A Latin term from the civil law and old English law meaning, broadly, to remove or move away. The term carries distinct meanings depending on context:
1. In Roman civil law: To remove something or someone without force — a physical displacement, whether of a person or property. At its mildest, the term denotes mere removal or relocation.
2. In Roman civil law (criminal sense): To remove with felonious intent; to steal. In this usage, amovere implies both physical taking and the corrupt purpose behind it — equivalent to the concept captured by the phrase contrectare et furto subtrahere, meaning to handle and carry off by theft.
3. In old English law: To remove from office; to put out of a position of authority or trust. Applied particularly to guardians and officers who had misconducted themselves, as in the maxim si male gesserit, amoveri poterit — if the guardian have misconducted, he may be removed.
Common Confusion
The dual valence of amovere in the civil law sources — simple removal on one hand, felonious taking on the other — can mislead a researcher who encounters the term without context. The innocent and criminal senses are genuinely distinct legal concepts that happened to share a Latin root and a single term. A passage citing amovere in a property or succession context almost certainly means neutral removal or displacement; a passage in a criminal or theft context invokes the felonious meaning. Burrill flags both senses explicitly and distinguishes them by reference to Brissonius for the criminal usage. Read surrounding text carefully before assigning meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
Amovere is a term a researcher is unlikely to encounter in modern legal sources but will find in treatises, digests, and case records drawing on Roman civil law or early English equity. Three navigational points matter:
First, the shift in meaning by context is not subtle — it is the difference between relocation and theft, or between administrative removal and criminal conduct. A researcher reading a Latin passage in a historical source must anchor the term to its subject matter before interpreting it.
Second, the old English law usage regarding removal from office connects amovere to a substantial body of guardian and trustee law. The maxim si male gesserit, amoveri poterit reflects a principle — that misconduct by a fiduciary is grounds for removal — that survived the Latin and became embedded in equity jurisdiction over guardians, executors, and trustees. Researchers following that thread forward into English equity and American chancery practice will find the underlying principle alive in English, even after the Latin disappears.
Third, the civil law citations Burrill provides — Digest 34.9.6, 47.9.3.5, and Code 7.19.6 — are traceable to Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. A researcher working with those primary sources will find amovere in the original Latin text. The Digest passage at 47.9 concerns destruction and removal of property in the context of fire, ruin, and shipwreck — a context that helps explain why the felonious-removal sense of the term appears there specifically.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is compact but precise, and it does the essential work of separating the civil law senses from the old English law sense. The citation to Brissonius — Barnabé Brisson's De Verbis Juris, a sixteenth-century dictionary of Roman legal Latin — for the criminal sense (contrectare et furto subtrahere) is a genuine scholarly attribution and reflects the lexicographic tradition Burrill is drawing on.
What Burrill's entry does not do is trace the principle embedded in the old English guardianship maxim into subsequent equity doctrine. The entry ends mid-sentence — "if the guardian have misconducted, he may" — which is likely a typographical truncation in the source, with "be removed" as the obvious completion. Researchers should treat the truncation as an artifact of the source, not as ambiguity in the underlying rule.
No other source dictionaries were provided for this entry. Researchers who need deeper civil law treatment should consult primary Roman law lexica (Brissonius, Forcellini) or modern Digest commentaries for the theft-related usage.
Jurisdictional Note
Amovere as a live legal term is confined to Roman civil law sources and early English common law and equity materials. It does not appear as operative language in modern American or English statutes. Its significance in U.S. legal research is almost entirely historical — encountered in treatises, equity pleadings, and scholarly commentary on Roman law influence.