Definition
Latin: "confiscated goods." Bona confiscata refers to property forfeited to the sovereign treasury as a consequence of crime or legal penalty. In Roman and civil law tradition, goods forfeit for offenses passed to the fiscus — the imperial treasury — and were designated by this term to distinguish them as sovereign property rather than privately owned goods. The concept carried forward into English common law, where goods forfeited to the Crown for certain offenses occupied an analogous position.
Common Confusion
Bona confiscata, bona felonum, and bona utlagatorum are related but distinct categories. Bona felonum (goods of felons) were forfeited upon conviction of felony and, in English law, typically escheated to the lord rather than passing to the Crown's treasury. Bona utlagatorum (goods of outlaws) followed yet another path. Bona confiscata specifically denotes goods forfeited to the treasury — the fiscus — as a consequence of offense, drawing its technical meaning from civil law. Conflating these three categories produces errors in tracing who received forfeited property and by what mechanism.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a civil law term of art with a specific institutional referent — the fiscus, or sovereign treasury — that a researcher must not flatten into the modern general concept of "forfeiture." The distinction matters because bona confiscata historically described goods that became property of the state treasury specifically by operation of law following conviction or attainder, not merely goods seized pending legal process or goods subject to customs or tax proceedings. Researchers working in early American law, colonial charters, or reception-of-common-law questions should note that the term arrives through civil law channels, not purely through English common law, and may appear in contexts shaped by Roman or continental legal influence.
The term is closely bound to fiscus. Corpus searches that isolate bona confiscata without also searching fiscus and its cognates will miss the conceptual infrastructure. Conversely, fiscus entries in historical sources will often not cross-reference bona confiscata by name even though the doctrine is the same. Running both searches against any given source will close that gap.
Historical sources treating bona confiscata almost uniformly anchor their definitions to 1 Bl. Comm. 299 — Blackstone's Commentaries — and add little beyond that citation. Researchers should go directly to Blackstone for substantive doctrine and treat the dictionary entries primarily as locating devices. The historical entries also consistently omit the important distinction between confiscation (bona confiscata) and attainder-based forfeiture (bona felonum and bona utlagatorum), which operated under different legal rules with different beneficiaries. That distinction is essential if the research involves who received the forfeited property and under what conditions it could be reclaimed or granted to others.
In American law, the constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder and the Fourteenth Amendment's abolition of corruption of blood effectively ended the closest domestic parallels to the Roman and English civil-law practice the term describes. Modern federal and state civil and criminal forfeiture statutes represent a functionally related but procedurally distinct regime and should not be read backward onto historical bona confiscata doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: goods forfeited for offenses that consequently became property of the imperial or royal treasury (fiscus). The definitions are nearly identical, and all four trace to the same Blackstone citation. This uniformity reflects the term's status as received civil-law vocabulary rather than a contested or evolving common-law concept — the dictionaries are transmitting a fixed technical meaning, not tracking doctrinal development.
Burrill's Law Dictionary adds the most useful framing, noting explicitly that confiscated goods "were so called, because they belonged to the fiscus, or imperial treasury," and providing a cross-reference to fiscus — the only one of the four sources to make that structural link explicit. Rapalje & Lawrence sharpens the definition slightly by specifying "forfeited for crime to the royal fiscus," making the criminal predicate clearer than Bouvier's bare "confiscated or forfeited."
None of the four sources engages with the distinction between bona confiscata, bona felonum, and bona utlagatorum, even though Bouvier gestures toward the distinction by placing the bona felonum entry immediately adjacent. Researchers should not infer from dictionary silence that those categories were interchangeable — they were not.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No direct match. The closest available entry — Recording Acts / Bona Fide Purchaser Doctrine (The Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia) — addresses a different "bona" Latin term in a distinct doctrinal context and is not relevant here.