Definition
Goods, wares, and merchandise of any kind; movables; articles of commerce capable of being bought, sold, or traded. The term functions as the plural of commodity and is used across two overlapping legal registers:
1. General commercial law. Any tangible personal property — goods, wares, merchandise — that moves through trade or commerce. In this sense, commodities is a broad catch-all encompassing virtually any movable article with market value.
2. Regulated markets and securities law. Raw materials, agricultural products, and financial instruments traded on organized exchanges and subject to federal regulatory oversight. In this more specific modern sense, commodities are distinguished from securities and are governed by dedicated federal statute, with jurisdiction vested in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The category includes physical goods such as grain, livestock, metals, and energy, as well as futures contracts and derivatives tied to those goods.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of commodity — goods or products, especially raw materials or agricultural products that can be bought and sold.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Articles of commerce; goods; wares; any movable or tangible thing that is produced or used as the subject of barter or sale; also, advantage; profit.
The common and legal meanings track closely at the surface but diverge in practice. In everyday speech, commodities often implies bulk raw materials — oil, wheat, copper. In historical legal texts, the term was broad enough to cover virtually any merchantable personal property. In modern regulatory law, commodities has a technical statutory definition that controls which transactions fall under federal jurisdiction — a definition that neither the common nor historical legal sense anticipates.
Common Confusion
Commodities vs. Securities. The boundary between a commodity and a security is one of the most litigated jurisdictional questions in modern financial regulation. The distinction determines whether the Securities and Exchange Commission or the CFTC has regulatory authority. Futures contracts on physical commodities are generally treated as commodities; equity interests in enterprises are generally securities. Hybrid instruments — certain swaps, cryptocurrency tokens, and structured products — have generated sustained legal uncertainty. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century sources will not encounter this distinction; it is a product of twentieth-century statutory architecture.
Commodities vs. Goods. In general commercial law, goods (as defined under the Uniform Commercial Code) and commodities overlap substantially, but are not identical. Goods is the operative term under UCC Article 2 governing sales; commodities is the operative term in commodity trading law. The two regimes can apply to the same underlying article.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Agricultural commodities. Historically the paradigm case — grain, livestock, cotton, and similar farm products. The original focus of federal commodity regulation in the early twentieth century.
Energy commodities. Crude oil, natural gas, electricity, and related products. A major category in modern exchange trading and regulatory enforcement.
Financial commodities. Interest rates, currency, and index-based instruments treated as commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act. The extension of commodity regulation to financial instruments was a significant statutory development of the late twentieth century.
Exempt commodities. Certain commodities that qualify for reduced regulatory treatment under federal statute, distinct from agricultural and financial categories.
Why It Matters in Research
The word commodities has traveled a significant conceptual distance from its historical meaning, and failure to account for this creates real research traps.
In pre-twentieth-century sources — including all three historical dictionaries supporting this entry — commodities simply means tradeable movable property. A nineteenth-century case using the word is almost certainly using it in this broad commercial sense. Do not import modern regulatory meaning into historical texts.
In twentieth- and twenty-first-century sources, commodities may carry the technical statutory meaning of the Commodity Exchange Act and its amendments. Regulatory, enforcement, and transactional materials from this period require attention to whether the author means the broad commercial sense or the jurisdictional regulatory sense.
The maxim appended in the historical dictionaries — Commodum ex injuria sua nemo habere debet (no person ought to have advantage from his own wrong) — appears in Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence immediately following the definition of commodities. This is a layout artifact of those editions, not a legal connection. Researchers consulting digitized versions of these dictionaries may encounter this maxim in proximity to the commodities entry and should not treat them as related concepts.
Jurisdictional questions are particularly acute for researchers working in commodity futures and derivatives. Whether a financial product qualifies as a commodity, a security, or something else determines not only which regulator applies but which body of case law is relevant. The corpus in this area grows rapidly with each major piece of financial legislation.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence — are in full agreement: commodities means goods, wares, and merchandise of any kind; movables; articles of trade or commerce. The definitions are nearly identical across sources, suggesting this was a settled, uncontroversial term in nineteenth-century commercial law.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds the useful clarification that a commodity is any personal thing capable of being traded or sold, emphasizing the quality of tradeability as the defining characteristic. This framing anticipates the modern regulatory question — whether a given instrument or asset is sufficiently commodity-like to fall within trading law — even if the historical sources themselves could not have foreseen the statutory architecture that would later depend on that line-drawing.
What the historical dictionaries entirely miss is the regulatory dimension. There is no trace of futures markets, exchange regulation, or jurisdictional competition between regulators. Researchers should treat the historical definitions as authoritative for general commercial law questions and as silent on the regulatory context that dominates modern commodities practice.
Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, federal law governs commodity futures and derivatives trading through the Commodity Exchange Act, with the CFTC as the primary regulator. State law governs ordinary commercial transactions in goods that would historically have been called commodities. Outside the United States, commodity regulation varies significantly by jurisdiction, and the term carries no uniform statutory meaning in international sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Commodity Regulation; Trade and Commerce; Securities and Financial Instruments