Definition
In Law French, *emporter* means "to carry away." The term appears in early English legal records, particularly Year Books, as a verb describing the physical act of removing or taking property from its place. It functions as a term of pleading in property and theft-related contexts, capturing the element of asportation — the carrying away of a thing — that was central to early common law distinctions between mere taking and completed theft.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Book materials, medieval plea rolls, or early English common law sources will encounter *emporter* as an operative verb in pleadings and judicial recitations. Its significance is almost entirely historical: the term carries no independent modern legal life, but it supplies the Law French root for what common law doctrine formalized as asportation, one of the essential elements of larceny at common law.
Two traps await the unwary researcher. First, *emporter* may appear without translation in Year Book transcriptions and abridgments, and its meaning can be obscured by variant spellings or partial Anglicization. Second, because it describes a physical act rather than a legal concept unto itself, it will not appear as a headword in most modern legal dictionaries — researchers may need to trace it backward from the doctrine of asportation, rather than forward from the French term.
The term is also a marker of the Law French register generally. Encountering *emporter* in a source signals that the document likely predates the Anglicization of legal proceedings that accelerated through the seventeenth century. This can assist in dating sources and calibrating how much interpretive weight to place on surrounding terminology.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives the entire entry as: "L. Fr. To carry away. Yearb. 8 Edw. III. 2." This is a characteristically spare entry for a pure Law French term — Burrill treats it as a translation item rather than a legal concept requiring elaboration, which itself tells the researcher something about the term's status even in mid-nineteenth century legal scholarship. It is a working vocabulary word of the Year Books, not a free-standing doctrine.
No elaboration appears in Burrill beyond the citation to Year Book 8 Edward III, which places the term squarely in the early fourteenth century English common law record. Other major historical dictionaries — Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's — do not carry the term as a headword, reinforcing that its circulation was narrow and its life as a legal term of art essentially ended with the decline of Law French pleading.
Researchers should note that *emporter* is closely related to, and sometimes interchangeable with, the Law French *prendre et emporter* (to take and carry away), which appears in theft and trespass pleadings as a paired phrase. The conjunction of taking (*prendre*) and carrying away (*emporter*) maps directly onto the common law elements of caption and asportation in larceny doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is confined to sources rooted in English common law and its Law French pleading tradition. It has no distinct jurisdictional variation within American or modern Commonwealth law, as it does not survive as a term of art in any contemporary legal system.