Definition
A Latin legal verb meaning "to carry away." In classical common law usage, asportare referred to the physical act of removing goods or personal property from one place to another without lawful authority. It appears primarily in old English writs and pleading formulas as the operative word describing the taking element of trespass to goods and, by extension, larceny.
The term anchors several related Latin phrases that appear throughout historical pleadings and writs:
— Cepit et asportavit ("he took and carried away"): the standard formula in trespass actions charging unlawful taking of personal property. The two verbs together — cepit (took) and asportavit (carried away) — describe the completed act of wrongful appropriation.
— De bonis asportatis ("for goods carried off"): the name used to identify a species of trespass action brought to recover for personal property unlawfully removed, withheld, or converted.
— Asportatus: the participial form, meaning "carried away," used descriptively in writ language (e.g., in the oath requirement that goods carried away were worth at least forty shillings).
Common Confusion
Asportare should not be confused with abducere, the Latin term used in old writs to describe the unlawful taking of animate things — persons or animals capable of moving themselves. Burrill draws the distinction directly: asportare applied to inanimate goods, while abducere applied to persons and animals. Researchers encountering both terms in the same writ or pleading should recognize they are describing legally distinct acts against different categories of property or persons.
Why It Matters in Research
Asportare is not a term of art in modern American law. It survives in legal writing primarily as a Latin antecedent to the English noun asportation, which remains a live concept in modern larceny doctrine. Researchers working in historical sources — particularly pre-nineteenth-century English and early American common law materials — will encounter asportare and its conjugated forms (asportavit, asportatus) embedded in writ formulas and pleading records rather than in analytical legal text.
The key navigational point: when searching historical corpus materials, the operative form is rarely the infinitive asportare. Researchers should run parallel searches on asportavit (past tense, third person singular, the form used in charging allegations), asportatus (participial form), and the full phrases cepit et asportavit and de bonis asportatis. Relying on asportare alone will miss most instances.
The forty-shilling oath threshold referenced in Burrill — requiring that carried-away goods be sworn to be worth at least that amount — connects to questions of jurisdictional minimum value in historical trespass and larceny actions, a consideration that surfaces in early statutory materials and grand jury practice.
For researchers tracing the doctrinal development of larceny, asportare is the Latin ancestor of the asportation element — the requirement that a thief actually move the stolen property, however slightly — that English and American courts debated well into the twentieth century. The continuity between the old writ formula and the modern element is direct and traceable through the corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill and Anderson agree on the core meaning: asportare means to carry away, and its principal legal home is the formula cepit et asportavit in trespass writs. Burrill adds useful texture by distinguishing asportare from abducere and by noting the specific pleading context (the forty-shilling oath requirement), grounding the term in writ practice rather than treating it as purely abstract vocabulary. Anderson is more compressed but usefully identifies de bonis asportatis as a named action and explicitly cross-references asportation, signaling that the term's living relevance runs through that derivative concept.
Neither source addresses the evolution from writ-based pleading to modern common law elements — an expected gap given that both dictionaries predate twentieth-century consolidation of larceny doctrine. Researchers should not expect historical dictionary treatment of the carrying-away element as a formal test; that analytical structure developed in case law and is not captured in the writ-vocabulary framework these dictionaries inhabit.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Asportation; Trespass de Bonis Asportatis; Larceny