Definition
Anticipation has three distinct legal meanings, each arising in a different area of practice.
1. General sense. The act of doing or taking a thing before its proper time — treating as present something that has not yet occurred or accrued.
2. Conveyancing and trust law. The act of assigning, charging, or otherwise dealing with income or property before it becomes due. Historically significant in the law of married women's separate estates: a restraint on anticipation (also called a forfeiture clause) prevented a woman from alienating or pledging future income from her separate trust property before it accrued. Such clauses were a standard feature of Victorian-era marriage settlements and remained operative in English law until abolished by statute in the twentieth century.
3. Patent law. The defeat of a patent claim on the ground that the invention was already known or in use before the patent application was filed. A prior inventor, publication, or public use within the relevant jurisdiction can be said to have anticipated the later patent — meaning the claimed invention lacks novelty. Anticipation is a complete bar to patentability: if every element of a patent claim is found in a single prior art reference, the claim is anticipated and therefore invalid.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of expecting or looking forward to something; the eagerness associated with waiting for something to occur. Also, in finance, prepayment of a debt in order to reduce interest owed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of taking up or considering something before its proper time in natural order; a previous impression or foretaste of what is to happen.
The common and legal meanings share a root idea — dealing with something before its natural time — but diverge sharply in application. In ordinary speech, anticipation is mental: expectation, eagerness, foresight. In law, anticipation is transactional: it describes the premature legal disposition of income or rights not yet accrued, or the prior existence of an invention that defeats a later patent claim. A researcher who encounters anticipation in a trust document or patent opinion should not import the colloquial meaning; the legal usage is structural, not psychological.
Common Confusion
Anticipation (patent law) is sometimes conflated with obviousness. They are distinct defenses. Anticipation requires that every element of the claimed invention appear in a single prior art reference. Obviousness does not require a single prior art reference to contain all elements; it asks whether a person of ordinary skill in the art would have found it obvious to combine existing references to arrive at the claimed invention. A claim can be obvious without being anticipated, and can be anticipated without the analysis reaching obviousness at all.
In conveyancing contexts, anticipation is sometimes confused with advancement. Anderson's Dictionary expressly distinguishes the two: advancement concerns gifts from a parent to a child applied against the child's future inheritance share, whereas anticipation concerns the premature dealing with income or property by the person entitled to it, often under a trust with a restraint clause.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Restraint on anticipation (also: clause against anticipation, forfeiture clause). A provision in a trust instrument or marriage settlement prohibiting a married woman from assigning or pledging income or capital before it fell due. The restraint protected the beneficiary from creditors and from pressure exerted by a husband. This form was specific to the law of married women's separate property and has no modern parallel in most jurisdictions following the enactment of married women's property legislation.
Anticipation in patent law (prior art bar). A formal ground for rejecting or invalidating a patent claim. For anticipation to apply, a single prior art reference must disclose each and every element of the claim, arranged as claimed.
Why It Matters in Research
The term carries entirely different legal freight depending on the practice area. Researchers must determine at the outset which sense is operative in the source under review.
In trust and conveyancing research, anticipation clauses were ubiquitous in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English settlements and appear with some frequency in American instruments drafted by English-trained lawyers or for English beneficiaries. The restraint on anticipation was a creature of equity developed specifically around the legal disabilities of married women. After married women's property acts removed those disabilities, the restraint on anticipation became anomalous — a protection that was sometimes a trap. English law abolished it prospectively; American jurisdictions handled the issue inconsistently. Researchers working in this area should be alert to whether a settlement predates or postdates the relevant married women's property legislation in the governing jurisdiction.
In patent research, anticipation is one of the most litigated invalidity defenses. The historical sources — including both Black's editions — gesture at the doctrine but do not capture its technical requirements as modern patent law has refined them. The single-reference rule, the identity-of-elements test, and the distinction from obviousness are all developed in case law that postdates the historical dictionaries substantially. Researchers relying solely on the historical dictionary entries for patent anticipation doctrine will have an incomplete and potentially misleading picture.
Corpus researchers should note that anticipation can appear in the same document in two senses simultaneously — a trust instrument drafted for a patentee might invoke both the conveyancing and patent meanings in adjacent provisions. Context and practice area must govern interpretation.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries cover the same two legal meanings: anticipation in conveyancing (dealing with income before it is due) and anticipation in patent law (prior invention as a bar). There is no material disagreement among them on either definition.
Anderson's is the most analytical of the four, explicitly linking anticipation to married women's separate estates and directing the reader to compare advancement and trust — useful cross-references that the other dictionaries omit. Anderson's also flags the patent context as an objection ground, framing it in terms of procedure (objection to issuing a patent) rather than purely substantive invalidity, which reflects the procedural posture of patent challenges in the period.
Black's (both editions) supplies the fullest treatment of the patent sense and the most direct statement of the conveyancing definition. The second edition cites Topliff v. Topliff for the patent definition — a real Supreme Court decision addressing the novelty bar — giving it a grounding in authority that the first edition and the other dictionaries lack.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the most compressed of the four, supplying the Latin root and a pair of illustrative English case citations without substantive elaboration. Its entry is useful primarily as a cross-index to source materials rather than as a stand-alone definition.
None of the historical dictionaries address the single-reference rule that became central to modern anticipation analysis in patent law, and none captures the restraint on anticipation as a drafting device in its full equitable context. Researchers should treat the historical entries as starting points, not endpoints.
Jurisdictional Note
The restraint on anticipation as a formal clause in trust instruments is primarily an English equitable doctrine. Its reception in American jurisdictions was uneven — some states recognized it, others did not, and the abolition of married women's property disabilities rendered it largely moot at different times in different states. In patent law, anticipation doctrine in U.S. law is governed by federal statute and case law; the definition of anticipating prior art, the date-of-invention rules, and the treatment of foreign prior art have all shifted significantly, particularly with the America Invents Act of 2011, which moved the U.S. toward a first-inventor-to-file system and altered the temporal analysis of prior art.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Patent Law: Novelty and Prior Art
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Trusts and Separate Estates