Definition
Arrestandis bonis (Latin: "for arresting goods") is a historical common law writ used to seize or attach the goods of a debtor as a form of security before judgment, or to prevent a defendant from dissipating assets pending resolution of a claim. The writ operated as a precautionary remedy, freezing personal property in the hands of the defendant or a third party so that a successful plaintiff would have something against which to enforce a future judgment.
In its broadest historical application, the writ functioned similarly to what modern practitioners would recognize as a prejudgment attachment or a freezing injunction — the law's mechanism for ensuring that a debtor could not defeat a creditor's anticipated recovery by moving, concealing, or transferring goods before the court could act.
Common Confusion
Arrestandis bonis is sometimes conflated with the writ of attachment generally, but the two are not identical. Attachment is a broad category of process; arrestandis bonis is a specific writ form within that category, more precisely associated with Scottish and early English civil procedure for securing goods prior to judgment. Researchers should also distinguish this writ from mesne process (process issued between the commencement of a suit and final judgment) and from distraint, which involved the taking of goods to compel performance rather than to secure a future judgment debt.
Why It Matters in Research
This is primarily a historical writ term with limited survival in modern Anglo-American practice. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century legal materials — court records, pleading books, Scottish civil procedure texts, and early common law treatises. The term appears more frequently in Scottish legal history than in English or American sources, reflecting differences in how Scots law developed its diligence (enforcement) procedures.
Several navigational traps apply:
First, the Bouvier's entry fragment preserved in the Law Mind corpus is deceptive in its brevity. The surviving text references arrest of judgment on former acquittal — a distinct procedural concept — which suggests the source excerpt has been indexed under this term by proximity rather than by direct definition. Researchers should not treat that Bouvier's fragment as a substantive gloss on arrestandis bonis itself.
Second, because the writ belongs to the Latin writ tradition, it may appear in variant spellings or abbreviations in historical records (de bonis arrestandis, bonis arrestandis). Corpus searches should account for these variants.
Third, modern equivalents — prejudgment attachment, Mareva injunctions (in Commonwealth jurisdictions), and asset freezing orders — drew on the conceptual heritage of writs like arrestandis bonis, but the procedural rules governing them are entirely statutory or equitable and carry no automatic connection to the historical writ form. Cross-reading historical commentary on the writ into modern attachment law is a research error.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the primary historical dictionary source available in the Law Mind corpus for this term, but the indexed fragment — concerning arrest of judgment following acquittal on a higher charge — does not directly define or illustrate the writ of arrestandis bonis. This is a corpus indexing artifact, not a substantive entry. Bouvier's fuller editions do address prejudgment process and the writ tradition, but researchers should not rely on this fragment as representative of Bouvier's treatment of the term.
Older English law dictionaries in the writ tradition — Jacob's Law Dictionary, Rastell's Termes de la Ley, and Cowell's Interpreter — provided more direct treatment of Latin writ nomenclature and would be productive external sources. For Scottish procedure specifically, Erskine's Institute and Bell's Dictionary and Digest of the Law of Scotland offer more precise accounts of arrestment of goods as a formal diligence remedy, where the conceptual lineage of this writ survives most clearly.
Historical sources broadly agree that the writ belonged to the pre-judgment phase of civil proceedings and was directed at goods rather than persons, distinguishing it from the body-based arrest writs of the same era.
Jurisdictional Note
The writ has no current procedural existence in U.S. federal or state courts. In Scotland, the functional descendant — arrestment — remains a recognized diligence under Scots law, governed by modern statute. English law replaced the historical writ forms with statutory attachment and, in equity, freezing injunctions. Researchers working in Commonwealth jurisdictions should consult local diligence or attachment statutes rather than the historical writ materials.