Definition
A Latin term meaning "he carried away." In legal usage, asportavit serves two functions. First, it appears as a verb in old pleading and indictment language to allege that a defendant carried away property belonging to another — the act of taking and removing being a required element in certain theft-related offenses. Second, it is used as a noun to denote the act of carrying away itself: the asportavit, or the removal of goods, as a discrete legal event. In old Welsh law, the term was also associated with a form of oath.
Common Confusion
Asportavit is closely associated with two related Latin terms that researchers should distinguish. Cepit ("he took") describes the act of taking possession; asportavit describes the subsequent act of carrying the property away from its original location. In the common law of larceny, both acts were theoretically required — cepit et asportavit ("he took and carried away") — but courts eventually treated even minimal movement as sufficient asportation. Researchers will also encounter asportation as the anglicized noun form describing the same concept; the two terms are functionally interchangeable in most sources, but asportavit is the conjugated Latin verb form found specifically in pleading contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
Asportavit is a term of art in the history of common law larceny pleading. Its significance is procedural and historical rather than substantive in modern law. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century criminal records, indictments, or treatises on pleading will encounter the phrase cepit et asportavit as a formulaic allegation — its presence signals that the pleader was charging larceny and attempting to satisfy the carrying-away requirement. The absence of asportavit in an early indictment could be a basis for technical challenge.
The term matters for corpus researchers in two specific ways. First, it appears in its Latin verb form in pleading records but shifts to the anglicized asportation in doctrinal discussion of larceny elements — researchers must search both forms when tracing the carrying-away requirement through the Law Mind corpus. Second, the requirement itself became a significant doctrinal question: how much movement was enough? Courts in the nineteenth century produced a substantial body of case law on minimal asportation, and that body of law is indexed under asportation, not asportavit. The Latin form tends to appear in treatises on criminal pleading and form books; the English form dominates substantive criminal law discussion.
The Welsh law reference in the second edition of Black's is a minor variant that receives no elaboration in any of the standard historical dictionaries and should be treated as an isolated notation rather than a developed legal concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement. All three record the primary meaning — "he carried away" — and note the noun usage. Burrill's is the most precise, attributing the noun usage to Lord Loughborough in 2 H. Bl. 4, a citation that Black's first edition reproduces and Black's second edition retains. Burrill also provides the Latin root asportare, which is useful for researchers tracing the term's appearance in variant forms across historical sources.
The second edition of Black's adds the Welsh law reference without elaboration or citation beyond "Brown," presumably a reference to a treatise on Welsh law. No other dictionary in the source set expands on this usage, and it cannot be independently developed from the materials provided. Researchers encountering asportavit in Welsh legal sources should treat this as a separate, unrelated usage requiring independent verification.
None of the three dictionaries address the doctrinal evolution of the asportation requirement in any depth — they record the term's meaning without engaging with the substantial nineteenth-century case law on what constitutes sufficient carrying away. For that doctrinal content, researchers must look beyond the dictionary shelf to criminal law treatises.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is a product of common law pleading and is therefore most relevant to English and American legal sources prior to the codification of criminal law. American jurisdictions largely abandoned formal Latin pleading requirements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and modern criminal codes use asportation or carrying away in plain English. The term appears primarily in historical records and is not a feature of contemporary American or English criminal practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Larceny; Criminal Pleading