Definition
De arrestandis bonis ne dissipentur (Latin: "for arresting goods lest they be dissipated") was a common law writ authorizing the seizure and holding of a defendant's personal property during the pendency of a lawsuit. Its purpose was preventive: to ensure that goods in the hands of a party could not be removed, concealed, or otherwise made away with before a judgment could be satisfied. The writ operated as an early form of prejudgment attachment, freezing assets so that a successful plaintiff would not find the defendant's property gone by the time the court rendered its decision.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English procedural sources and formularies. Researchers encountering it in historical materials should understand it as a precursor to modern prejudgment attachment and injunctive relief against asset dissipation — concepts that survive in contemporary law under entirely different labels and procedural frameworks. The writ itself is obsolete in practice, and no modern American or English jurisdiction employs it by this name.
The primary research trap is terminological: a researcher working in equity sources may conflate this writ with the Mareva injunction (now called a freezing order in English practice) or with statutory attachment remedies. These are functional successors, but they arise from different procedural lineages — the writ belonged to the common law side of the courts, while much of the later development of asset-freezing relief occurred in equity. Understanding this distinction matters when tracing doctrine across pre-Judicature Act English materials.
Researchers should also note that the Latin title appears with variant spellings across historical sources. Dissipentur is sometimes rendered disssipentur or dis-sipentur (as in some printed editions of the Register of Original Writs), and bonis is occasionally preceded by de or omitted in shorthand references. Index and catalog searches in historical databases should account for these variants.
This writ is a useful marker for dating and contextualizing procedural practice. Its presence in a document signals engagement with pre-modern English common law procedure, likely prior to the systematic statutory reform of attachment remedies in the nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed., Supplemental) provides the only entry among the Law Mind shelf sources, defining the writ as one "which lay to seize goods in the hands of a party during the pendency of a suit, to prevent their being made away with," with a citation to the Registrum Omnium Brevium (Reg. orig. 126b) — a foundational collection of English original writ forms. The entry is brief and descriptive, offering procedural function without doctrinal elaboration.
No other shelf sources in the Law Mind corpus contain entries for this writ, which reflects its obscurity outside of early common law procedure. Historical dictionaries covering writs more comprehensively — such as Rastell's Termes de la Ley and later editions of Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium — would be the appropriate secondary sources for a researcher seeking fuller treatment. The Registrum Omnium Brevium itself remains the primary source cited across authorities.
The brevity of coverage across historical dictionaries is itself informative: this writ occupied a narrow procedural niche and was not the subject of significant doctrinal development. It was a practical instrument of court administration rather than a site of legal controversy.
Jurisdictional Note
This writ was an instrument of the English common law courts and has no direct American statutory successor under this name. American attachment and sequestration remedies developed through separate colonial and state statutory traditions. Researchers working in early American colonial court records may encounter analogous practices, but the writ form itself did not transplant intact.