Definition
BOUND carries two distinct legal meanings depending on context, functioning as both adjective and noun.
1. As an adjective — constrained by obligation: A person or entity is bound when they are under a legal duty created by a bond, covenant, contract, or court order. The constraint may arise by agreement, by operation of law, or by judicial decree. To say a party is bound is to say that a legal obligation attaches to them and may be enforced against them.
2. As an adjective — in shipping law: A vessel is "bound to" or "bound for" a named port when it is destined or intended to make a voyage to that place. This usage appears in insurance contracts, charter parties, and admiralty documents, where the vessel's destination defines the scope of coverage or the terms of the engagement.
3. As a noun — a limit or boundary line: In property law, a bound is a line enclosing or marking off a tract of land. It is the linear segment of a property description — the line between corners or angles. This is the sense carried into the phrase "metes and bounds," where metes denotes the terminal points (corners, angles) and bounds denotes the lines running between them, though in practice the terms are used interchangeably.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obliged to; constrained or confined; unable to move freely; restricted to a certain place or condition.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The external or limiting line of any object or space; that which limits or restrains or within which something is limited or restrained; a limit or confine.
The common meanings are not wrong, but they flatten the legal term's dual function. Ordinary usage collapses the adjective (obligated) and the noun (a boundary line) into loosely related ideas about constraint. Legal usage keeps them sharply separate: the adjective lives in contract, bond, and obligations law; the noun lives in property descriptions and land survey. A researcher who encounters "bound" in a historical document must identify which register is active before interpreting the passage.
Common Confusion
Bound (noun) and boundary are related but not identical. Burrill draws on Webster's own distinction: a bound is the limit itself, while a boundary is a visible mark designating that limit — a physical monument, fence, or stake. In modern practice and most legal instruments this distinction has collapsed, and the terms are used interchangeably. However, in older deeds and survey disputes the difference can matter: if a deed calls for a "bound," it may be describing an abstract line; if it calls for a "boundary," it may be calling for a physical monument whose location governs over measurements if the two conflict.
Bound (adjective — obligation) should not be confused with bound (adjective — shipping destination). The contexts rarely overlap, but both appear in historical maritime insurance documents, where a vessel may be described as "bound for Havana" in one clause and the underwriter described as "bound" to pay in another.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Metes and bounds: The standard common-law method of property description using a combination of terminal points (metes) and connecting lines (bounds). Calls in a metes-and-bounds description may reference monuments, courses, distances, or adjoining owners.
Bound to / Bound for: Shipping-law formula indicating a vessel's intended destination. Governs the attachment and scope of marine insurance, the vessel's status in prize law, and the terms of charter parties.
Bound by judgment / bound by contract: Adjective usage in the obligations sense, indicating that a legal duty has attached and is enforceable against the named party.
Why It Matters in Research
The term's dual function creates indexing and interpretation problems across the corpus. A full-text search for "bound" in historical legal materials will surface results from at least three distinct legal contexts — obligations, shipping, and land description — with no structural signal distinguishing them. Corpus researchers must read surrounding language carefully to identify which meaning is operative.
In property research, the noun sense is foundational to interpreting historical deeds. Pre-rectangular-survey jurisdictions (the original thirteen states plus several others) relied exclusively on metes-and-bounds descriptions, meaning that every property description in those records will use this term. The Burrill entry reflects the older, more technically precise usage in which metes and bounds referred to distinct features; researchers working with very early colonial-era instruments should be alert to that precision and should not assume the terms were always synonymous.
In obligations research, the adjective sense connects directly to the law of bonds and suretyship. Historical instruments frequently recite that a party is "held and firmly bound" — a formulaic phrase of art in bond drafting. Encountering this phrase signals a bond instrument, not a general contract, and the interpretive rules that apply differ accordingly.
In admiralty and marine insurance research, the "bound to/for" formula carries legal consequences that extend beyond mere description. The named destination could determine whether a loss was covered, whether a deviation occurred, and whether prize jurisdiction attached. This usage is heavily concentrated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources and diminishes in modern materials.
Jurisdictional variation in metes-and-bounds practice is significant: states using the federal rectangular survey system (most of the Midwest and West) will have far less occasion to use the term in its property sense, while Atlantic seaboard and Southern states will use it pervasively in older deed records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (both editions) and Burrill agree on the structural framework: adjective for the obligation/shipping senses, noun for the boundary sense. The entries are nearly identical across the two Black's editions, suggesting the term was settled by the time of the second edition with no meaningful doctrinal shift.
Burrill adds the most analytical value by preserving the technical distinction between metes and bounds as separate features of a property description, and by flagging that Webster himself drew a further distinction between a bound (abstract limit) and a boundary (visible mark). Neither Black's edition engages with this granularity. For researchers working with historical deed construction disputes, Burrill is the more useful reference precisely because it preserves a precision that Black's smooths over.
None of the historical entries address the adjective sense of "bound" in any depth beyond the formula "held and firmly bound" in bond instruments. Researchers seeking fuller treatment of the obligation sense should cross-reference entries for BOND, OBLIGOR, and COVENANT, where the historical dictionaries are more expansive.
Jurisdictional Note
The noun sense (boundary line) is most significant in jurisdictions using metes-and-bounds descriptions — primarily the original thirteen states, Texas, and portions of the South and Northeast. States organized under the federal Public Land Survey System use township-and-range descriptions that do not rely on the metes-and-bounds vocabulary in the same way, though "bounds" may still appear in older local grants and patents predating survey organization.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Property Descriptions — Metes and Bounds, Government Survey, Plat Maps, and Ambiguity (The Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia)