Definition
In legal usage, "bag" carries two distinct senses:
1. A sack or similar receptacle used to hold goods or merchandise. Historically, the term referred to a customary unit of measure—a "bag" of a given commodity meant a standard quantity associated with that commodity's trade. The precise amount varied by goods and region, making bag an uncertain measure in historical commercial law.
2. (Legal practice, historical) The satchel, sack, or pouch in which lawyers carried their briefs and papers to court. In English legal culture, this receptacle was conventionally made of green cloth and known as the "green bag," functioning as a professional emblem of the practitioner rather than a defined legal concept.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A soft or structured container—cloth, paper, leather, or plastic—open at the top or equipped with handles, used to carry personal items, food, or goods. The term is broad and informal, encompassing shopping bags, handbags, backpacks, and suitcases.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A sack or pouch for holding anything; also, a silken purse formerly tied about men's hair; a measured quantity of a commodity; the quantity of game taken in a hunt.
The legal meanings of "bag" diverge from common usage in two directions. As a commercial measure, it imposed a quantitative meaning on what common speech treats as a container of any size—though that quantity was itself contested. As a term of legal-professional culture, the "green bag" carried symbolic weight that the ordinary word "bag" does not.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Green Bag: The distinctive green cloth satchel associated with English barristers and solicitors. By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the green bag had become a recognized symbol of the legal profession in England, appearing in theatrical productions, satire, and popular literature. Anderson's Dictionary of Law preserves this usage explicitly, noting its appearance in performances during the time of Queen Caroline's trial (1820). The term survived long enough to lend its name to a well-known legal periodical. It has no operative legal significance today but is essential context for understanding historical English legal culture and iconography.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in commercial law sources—particularly pre-nineteenth century English or American trade records, customs documents, or merchant disputes—will encounter "bag" as a unit of measure. The critical trap is that bag was not a fixed or universal standard. Unlike the bushel or the ton, a "bag" of pepper, wool, or grain could mean different amounts depending on the commodity, the port, and the era. Historical sources that treat bag as a definite quantity should be read skeptically; the word functioned more like "lot" or "parcel" in context-dependent commercial practice.
In legal history and biography sources, the "green bag" appears frequently in contexts that can mislead: it is not a legal instrument, not a pleading, and not a court record. It is a professional cultural artifact. When period sources reference a lawyer's green bag, they are speaking to professional identity, not to the contents of any specific filing.
Bouvier's curious entry—"of ill repute, for purposes of blackmail and robbery"—appears to be a fragment, likely a surviving snippet of a "bag" compound entry (perhaps "bag house" or similar) separated from its context. Researchers should treat it as an editorial artifact, not a freestanding definition.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries largely converge on the commodity-measure sense but disagree on particulars. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) both cite Wharton for the proposition that a bag is "a certain and customary quantity of goods and merchandise in a sack," suggesting settled usage—but Bouvier, citing Jacob, calls it "an uncertain quantity... from three to four hundred," which directly contradicts the notion of certainty. This tension is historically accurate: the bag as a unit was customary in the sense of being locally conventional, not universal in the sense of being legally fixed.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law stands apart from the other sources by preserving the "green bag" tradition in some depth, providing the only entry among the shelf sources that addresses bag as a legal-professional cultural symbol rather than a commercial measure. This is the most historically textured of the available entries and is of particular value to legal historians.
What the historical sources largely miss is any treatment of bag in the context of search and seizure law, where the physical container—whatever it is called—has become legally significant in modern Fourth Amendment and analogous constitutional jurisprudence. The commodity-measure sense has effectively disappeared from modern legal usage; the container sense now does its work in constitutional and criminal procedure doctrine under other headings.
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Jurisdictional Note
The commodity-measure sense of "bag" is essentially a historical curiosity in modern common law jurisdictions and carries no operative significance in contemporary commercial law. The green bag tradition is specific to English legal culture and has no American analog.
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