Definition
"Down the creek on both sides for quan" is not a recognized legal term, doctrine, or term of art. The phrase does not appear as a standalone entry in Rapalje & Lawrence's *A Dictionary of American and English Law* (1883) or in any other identified legal dictionary, treatise, or body of case law.
The fragment appearing in the source material — "TITY, (in the description of land). 7 Pet. (U. S.) 218" — is a corrupted or truncated record. In context, this appears to be the tail end of the word "QUANTITY," representing the entry for "QUANTITY (in the description of land)" with a citation to a reported U.S. Supreme Court decision from 7 Peters (32 U.S.) 218. The phrase submitted for definition appears to be a parsing artifact, OCR corruption, or data extraction error that combined non-adjacent text fragments into a nonsensical string. It is not a legal term.
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Why It Matters in Research
This entry is a research caution, not a substantive definition. Researchers working with digitized historical legal dictionaries — including Rapalje & Lawrence — will encounter exactly this kind of corrupted text. OCR errors, damaged source pages, broken column layouts, and improperly parsed multi-column print formats routinely produce phantom "terms" that look like entries but are fragments of real entries stitched to unrelated text.
The underlying real entry — QUANTITY in the description of land — is a legitimate subject in early American property law. Disputes over whether a deed conveys land by metes and bounds (specific boundaries controlling) or by quantity (acreage controlling) were the subject of significant nineteenth-century litigation. When the two conflict, courts generally hold that boundaries control over stated quantity. The citation to 7 Peters 218 points toward the Supreme Court's early land-description jurisprudence and is worth consulting if the underlying property-law question is the actual research target.
If you encountered this phrase in a digitized source and believed it to be a legal term, the appropriate next step is to return to the original print source, locate the surrounding page, and reconstruct the actual entry. Do not treat OCR-generated fragments as authoritative text.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provides no entry for "Down the creek on both sides for quan." The source fragment submitted corresponds to a partial rendering of the QUANTITY entry, which addressed the legal significance of quantity designations in land descriptions. The truncation before "TITY" and the appended geographic-sounding phrase suggest a multi-column page was read linearly rather than column-by-column, merging text from adjacent columns or pages into a false compound entry. Historical legal dictionaries printed in double-column format are especially vulnerable to this class of digitization error. No other shelf source — Black's, Bouvier, Burrill, or Abbott — contains this phrase.
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