Definition
EXPEDIMENT is an archaic legal term referring to the whole of a person's goods and chattels — the entirety of one's movable property, sometimes rendered as "bag and baggage." The term captured the complete inventory of personal belongings a person possessed, with no portion excluded.
The term appears in historical legal writing primarily as a descriptor of total personal estate, particularly in contexts involving forfeiture, seizure, or the transfer of all movable property belonging to an individual.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "expedient."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An expedient; a means or resource. Marked as obsolete, with citation to Barrow: "A like expediment to remove discontent."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is historically significant. In ordinary English, "expediment" was simply a variant spelling of "expedient" — meaning a practical means to an end. In legal usage, however, the term carried a distinct technical meaning wholly unrelated to that sense: the totality of a person's movable goods and chattels. A researcher encountering the term in a legal source must not interpret it through the common-language lens of "expedient" or "useful measure." The two uses share a Latin root but diverged entirely in application.
Common Confusion
EXPEDIMENT should not be confused with EXPEDIENT (a practical measure or means) or with IMPEDIMENT (a legal bar or obstacle), despite superficial phonetic similarity to the latter. In historical manuscripts or transcriptions, the term may also be misread as "impediment," which carries the opposite practical connotation — a bar rather than a body of possessions. Researchers working with handwritten legal records should verify context carefully before concluding which term is intended.
Why It Matters in Research
EXPEDIMENT is a ghost term for most modern researchers — it does not appear in current legal usage and is absent from modern legal dictionaries. Its significance is almost entirely historical and archival.
Researchers working with early English legal records, colonial American property law, forfeiture proceedings, or historical estate inventories may encounter the term. Its meaning — the whole of one's goods and chattels — places it in the same conceptual space as terms governing total personal property seizure, such as those arising in attainder, outlawry, or judgment enforcement contexts.
The Law Mind corpus researcher should note that both Black's editions include the term primarily as a vocabulary entry without extensive doctrinal elaboration, citing Wharton as authority. This suggests the term's legal life was largely definitional rather than operative — appearing in descriptions of legal consequences rather than as a term of art with its own body of case law.
Because the common-language meaning of "expediment" (a variant of "expedient") was already obsolete by the time of Webster's 1913, there is meaningful risk that historical transcribers or indexers misread or misfiled the term. Searching historical databases by term alone may yield inconsistent results. Cross-referencing against "goods and chattels," "bag and baggage," and related property terms will produce more reliable corpus coverage.
The two maxims appended in both Black's editions — Expedit reipublicae ne sua re quis male utatur and Expedit reipublicae ut sit finis litium — are not definitions of "expediment" but are Latin maxims sharing the root expedit. Their placement immediately after the definition entry in both editions reflects dictionary formatting conventions of the period, not a substantive connection to the term itself. Researchers should treat them as separate entries that happened to be alphabetically proximate.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary are in full agreement on the definition: "the whole of a person's goods and chattels, bag and baggage," citing Wharton. No divergence between editions exists. The definition is brief in both, suggesting the term was included for completeness of historical vocabulary rather than for active doctrinal use even at the time of those editions' publication.
No additional nuance or qualification appears across either source. Wharton's attribution is consistent across both, though neither edition provides a specific work title, making independent verification of Wharton's original treatment dependent on consulting his law lexicon or legal writings directly.
The term's absence from later Black's editions reflects its obsolescence in active legal practice. Historical dictionaries preserve it; modern resources have dropped it entirely.
Jurisdictional Note
No meaningful jurisdictional variation applies. The term is obsolete across all common-law jurisdictions and does not appear in any modern statutory or regulatory framework. Its relevance is uniform in that it is uniformly historical.