Definition
Arrest is the seizure or detention of a person by lawful authority, restraining their liberty for the purpose of bringing them within the custody of the law. Three core purposes appear across all definitions: compelling obedience to court orders, preventing the commission of a crime, or securing the appearance of a person charged with or suspected of an offense.
The term carries two distinct legal applications:
1. CRIMINAL AND QUASI-CRIMINAL ARREST: The taking of a person into physical custody — by a law enforcement officer or, in historical practice, a private citizen — based on probable cause that the person has committed or is committing an offense. The act may be with or without a warrant.
2. CIVIL AND ADMIRALTY ARREST: The seizure or detention of a person or property by judicial process in a civil action. Arrest of a ship in admiralty proceedings is the most common surviving form of this usage — a judicial hold on a vessel to secure a financial claim against its operators. Civil arrest of persons (arrest for debt) was once common but has been abolished or severely restricted throughout most American jurisdictions.
A third, narrower usage appears in civil procedure: arrest of judgment, by which a court withholds entry of judgment on the ground that the pleadings disclose a fatal defect. This procedural device has largely been superseded by modern motion practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The process of arresting a criminal, suspect, etc.; a confinement or detention following such action; any seizure by power, physical or otherwise.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To stop, check, or hinder the motion or action of something; to take or seize by authority of law; to seize upon and fix the attention.
The common-language definitions are broader and more physical than the legal standard. In ordinary use, arrest suggests physical seizure and detention. The legal definition requires lawful authority as an essential element — an unlawful physical seizure is not an arrest in the legal sense but may constitute false imprisonment or kidnapping. Additionally, legal arrest does not require physical touching in all formulations: a submission to an officer's assertion of authority, without physical contact, may constitute a legal arrest and trigger constitutional protections.
Common Confusion
ARREST VS. DETENTION VS. STOP
A stop (investigatory detention or Terry stop) is a brief, temporary restraint short of full arrest, justified by reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause. An arrest, by contrast, requires probable cause, carries greater constitutional weight, and triggers the full panoply of custodial rights. The line between a prolonged stop and a de facto arrest is not always clear and has generated substantial constitutional litigation. Historical sources predate this three-tier framework entirely and should be read with caution — they use "detention" and "arrest" less precisely.
Core Elements
For a lawful arrest, historical and modern sources converge on the following requirements:
1. AUTHORITY: The arresting party must act under lawful authority — an officer with jurisdiction, a warrant, or recognized common-law authority for citizen's arrest.
2. INTENT: The act must be directed at taking a specific person into custody, not merely restraining movement incidentally.
3. RESTRAINT OF LIBERTY: Actual or constructive restraint of the person's freedom of movement. Physical touching is the classic form; submission to an assertion of authority without touching is recognized in modern constitutional doctrine.
4. COMMUNICATION (WHERE REQUIRED): In some formulations, the arrested person must be informed of the fact of arrest or the charge, though this requirement has varied by jurisdiction and era.
In constitutional terms, arrest triggers Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable seizures, Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, and Sixth Amendment rights to counsel upon initiation of formal proceedings.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
ARREST WITH WARRANT: Arrest pursuant to a judicial order, typically an arrest warrant supported by probable cause upon sworn complaint. Considered the presumptively constitutional mode.
ARREST WITHOUT WARRANT (WARRANTLESS ARREST): Permitted at common law and under modern doctrine where an officer has probable cause to believe a felony has been committed, or in the officer's presence for misdemeanors. Exact rules vary by jurisdiction.
CITIZEN'S ARREST: At common law, private persons could arrest for felonies committed in their presence or where they had reasonable grounds to believe a felony had been committed. Severely narrowed by statute in many jurisdictions following high-profile abuses.
CIVIL ARREST: Detention of a person to compel compliance with a civil judgment or to secure their appearance in a civil action. Once standard practice for debt collection; abolished or restricted in most U.S. jurisdictions.
ADMIRALTY ARREST (ATTACHMENT): Seizure of a vessel, cargo, or freight by court process to secure a maritime claim. Survives in active use in admiralty practice.
ARREST OF JUDGMENT: A court's withholding of final judgment upon a showing that the pleadings are fatally defective. A procedural relic largely replaced by motions to dismiss and post-trial motions.
Why It Matters in Research
The most important navigational challenge is the term's multiple distinct legal contexts. A researcher encountering "arrest" in a historical source must determine which strand applies — criminal custody, civil debt enforcement, admiralty seizure, or arrest of judgment — because the procedural rules, constitutional protections, and remedies differ entirely. Historical sources often address all four without clearly distinguishing them.
Civil arrest of persons was a routine mechanism of debt enforcement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bouvier's and Black's first edition both address it without flagging it as unusual. Researchers using corpus materials from before the late nineteenth century should assume that "arrest" in a civil context may refer to this now-abolished practice. Do not read constitutional Fourth Amendment analysis back onto historical civil arrest doctrine.
The phrase "arrest of judgment" appears frequently in older case law and pleading treatises. It is a motion, not a physical act, and has nothing to do with the arrest of persons. Context will usually be clear, but careless searching on "arrest" across a corpus will return both.
The constitutional framework that modern lawyers associate with arrest — probable cause, warrant requirements, Miranda rights, custodial interrogation rules — is almost entirely absent from historical dictionary definitions. Black's and Burrill's describe the mechanics; they do not describe what we now call Fourth Amendment seizure doctrine. That doctrinal superstructure developed through twentieth-century caselaw and is addressed in the encyclopedia entries linked above.
Rapalje & Lawrence's coverage of arrest in the source material is fragmentary — the provided extract addresses arms and armies rather than arrest. That source may be of limited utility for this term specifically.
Anderson's entry conflates arrest with arrear in the provided excerpt, which appears to be a digitization or extraction artifact. Use Anderson's for this term with caution; verify against primary sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Burrill's offer the most developed treatments and are in substantial agreement: arrest is the stopping or apprehending of a person by lawful authority, with the purpose of bringing that person within the law's custody. Both emphasize that it is the restraint of liberty, not mere physical contact, that constitutes the act. Burrill adds a useful formulation from older authority describing arrest as "the beginning of imprisonment, when a man is first taken" — a phrase that captures the temporal and sequential character of arrest as the threshold event in criminal process.
Bouvier's entry, in the extracted material provided, does not address criminal arrest directly but engages with the privilege of self-defense and justification, which contextually suggests treatment of arrest in connection with lawful force. The reference to a person defending against arrest-related force is consistent with Bouvier's generally practical, practitioner-facing orientation.
The historical sources share a common gap: they define arrest in terms of physical mechanics and lawful authority but say little about the procedural formalities now considered constitutional requirements. Probable cause as a constitutional standard, the exclusionary rule, and rights upon custodial detention are entirely absent. This is not an omission — those doctrines did not exist in developed form when most of these dictionaries were compiled. A researcher treating these definitions as a complete account of arrest law would miss the entire constitutional dimension.
Jurisdictional Note
Warrantless arrest standards, citizen's arrest rules, and the scope of civil arrest vary significantly by state. Several states have substantially restricted or abolished citizen's arrest statutes in recent years. Federal admiralty arrest procedure is governed by the Supplemental Rules for Admiralty or Maritime Claims and Asset Forfeiture Actions, which operate as a distinct procedural regime from general civil arrest.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Arrest — Probable Cause, Warrants, and Procedure (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Resisting Arrest and Obstruction of Law Enforcement (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
Right to Silence — Pre-Arrest and Post-Arrest (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)