Definition
A Court of Regards was one of the ancient English forest courts, convened once every three years for the purpose of "lawing" or "expeditation" of dogs kept within or near royal forests. Lawing (also called expeditation) was a procedure by which the claws or balls of a dog's forefeet were removed to prevent the animal from chasing and killing the king's deer. The court's function was essentially administrative and regulatory: to enforce forest law by ensuring that dogs belonging to persons living within the forest boundaries were mutilated in the prescribed manner so they could not threaten royal game. The Court of Regards was one of several forest tribunals operating under the broader system of English forest law, alongside the Court of Attachments, the Court of Sweinmote, and the Justice Seat.
Common Confusion
The Court of Regards is sometimes loosely grouped with the Court of Sweinmote or the Justice Seat as though these were interchangeable forest tribunals. They were not. The Court of Sweinmote handled presentments of forest offenses and prepared cases for the Justice Seat, which held the highest forest jurisdiction. The Court of Regards had the narrowest and most specific mandate: the triennial inspection and lawing of dogs. Researchers encountering references to "forest courts" in historical sources should not assume that a citation to one applies equally to another.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical legal sources dealing with English forest law and has no living counterpart in modern law. Researchers will encounter it in:
— Discussions of the medieval and early modern English forest system, particularly materials derived from or citing Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III, chapter 6) and Crabb's History of English Law.
— Primary and secondary sources on the prerogative rights of the Crown over royal forests, chases, and warrens.
— Antiquarian legal dictionaries and treatises where forest courts are catalogued as a group. The term is typically defined briefly and by reference to Blackstone, meaning entries across sources are often nearly identical and add little beyond the core procedural description.
The principal research trap is expecting jurisdictional variation or doctrinal depth that does not exist. The Court of Regards was a highly localized English institution with no American reception, no colonial equivalent, and no statutory successor. It was effectively extinct well before the American founding. A researcher who encounters this term in a historical document is almost certainly dealing with a description of English forest administration, not a court with ongoing legal authority.
The term "regards" in this context carries its own technical forest-law meaning (an inspection or survey), and researchers should not conflate it with the modern word "regard" or with unrelated uses of the word in other legal contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in close agreement: both identify the Court of Regards as a forest court convened every three years for the lawing or expeditation of dogs, and both cite Blackstone (3 Bl. Com. 71–72) as the primary authority. Burrill additionally references Crabb's History of English Law at page 155, which provides slightly more historical context on the forest court system as a whole.
Neither dictionary elaborates beyond the procedural core, and neither attempts to trace the court's origin, the statutes governing it, or its eventual obsolescence. This is consistent with how both sources handle obsolete English institutions: they record the definition for completeness rather than for practical guidance. Blackstone himself treats the court briefly, noting the triennial cycle and the expeditation procedure as characteristic features of forest governance.
Neither source flags what historical researchers should note: that the forest court system was already in severe decline by the seventeenth century and that the Court of Regards, as a body with such a narrow mandate, left a thin documentary trail. The entries in these dictionaries are essentially Blackstone summaries, and researchers seeking more than that description will need to go to specialized histories of English forest law rather than to legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The Court of Regards was an exclusively English institution with no counterpart in Scotland, Ireland, or the American colonies. American legal sources do not reference it as an operative court. It appears in American legal dictionaries purely for historical completeness.