Definition
To forestall, in legal usage, carries two distinct meanings that share a common thread: intercepting or obstructing something before it reaches its natural destination.
1. Physical obstruction. In the older common law sense, to forestall means to intercept or obstruct a person or thing on the way to a lawful destination — blocking a passenger on the king's highway, besetting the path of a tenant to prevent the tenant from reaching leased premises, or intercepting a deer before it could regain the forest. Each usage describes unlawful interference with a rightful course of passage or return.
2. Market forestalling. The economically significant legal use — more fully treated under FORESTALLING THE MARKET — describes the practice of purchasing goods (particularly foodstuffs) before they reach an open market, in order to resell at an inflated price. This was a criminal offense under English common law and early statutes, aimed at protecting consumers from monopolistic manipulation of food supplies.
The connecting principle across both meanings is prevention by advance interception: in the physical sense, intercepting movement toward a lawful place; in the commercial sense, intercepting goods before they reach the competitive marketplace.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To prevent, delay, or hinder something by taking precautionary or anticipatory measures; to avert or preclude. Commonly used in the sense of getting ahead of a problem before it occurs — forestalling a crisis, forestalling objections.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To take beforehand or in advance; to anticipate; to take possession of in advance of another, to the exclusion or detriment of the latter; to get ahead of; to preoccupy; to exclude, hinder, or prevent by prior measures.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant in one direction: modern ordinary usage retains only the forward-looking, preventive sense — forestalling a problem. The specifically legal uses, both physical obstruction of passage and commercial interception of market goods, have dropped almost entirely out of popular consciousness. A researcher encountering forestall in a historical legal source should resist the impulse to read it as merely prudent anticipation; in those contexts it denotes a specific actionable wrong.
Common Confusion
FORESTALL is frequently used as shorthand for FORESTALLING THE MARKET, which is the more developed doctrine. They are related but not identical: forestall covers the broader family of obstruction offenses, while forestalling the market is the specific commercial offense. Researchers should not assume that every reference to forestalling in historical sources involves market manipulation; context — whether the passage concerns roads, tenants, deer, or trade — controls the meaning.
FORESTALL should also be distinguished from ENGROSSING and REGRATING, two companion market offenses with which it was often grouped in statutes and indictments. Engrossing involved buying up large quantities of goods ahead of market day; regrating involved buying and reselling in the same or nearby market. The three offenses overlapped substantially and were often charged together, but they were technically distinct.
Why It Matters in Research
The term's primary legal life is historical. Modern researchers are unlikely to encounter forestall as a living legal standard; its significance is almost entirely in reading English common law sources, early American materials derived from English precedent, and statutory histories of market regulation.
Several research traps deserve attention.
First, the physical obstruction meanings — highway blockage, tenant interference, deer interception — appear in early dictionaries and Blackstone but represent archaic usage that had no robust doctrinal development. They functioned more as illustrative examples of the word's range than as frequently litigated legal categories. Do not expect case law on the deer interception meaning.
Second, the market forestalling offense had a long statutory life in England but was effectively abolished by the Forestalling, Regrating and Engrossing Act 1844. American jurisdictions generally did not carry the offense forward into their own statutory codes in any coherent form, though early American courts occasionally discussed the common law offense in the context of market regulation and monopoly. Researchers tracing the history of antitrust and price control concepts may find forestalling discussed as a conceptual precursor, but the connection is genealogical rather than doctrinal.
Third, sources that group forestalling, engrossing, and regrating together are reporting a statutory tradition, not necessarily a unified common law doctrine. The grouping reflects legislative habit more than analytical coherence.
Fourth, the Bouvier's citation to "8 Bla. Com. 170" is a transcription error; the correct reference is 3 Blackstone's Commentaries 170, as Black's correctly states. This kind of copying error propagates across historical dictionaries and should prompt verification at the primary source.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement, to the point of near-identical language — a sign that each is drawing from the same limited pool of authority, primarily Cowell's Interpreter and Blackstone's Commentaries. None of the three develops the market forestalling meaning at length within the forestall entry itself, instead directing readers to the separate entry FORESTALLING THE MARKET. This cross-reference structure is appropriate given that the market offense was the legally consequential application.
Black's Second Edition adds a sub-entry for FORESTALLER — defined as obstruction, hindrance, the offense of stopping a highway, hindering a tenant from coming to land, or intercepting a deer — which confirms that the term's legal valence was understood primarily through its obstruction meanings, not through the common anticipatory sense.
None of the historical dictionaries provides any analytical treatment of the elements of the offense or its procedural posture. They function as glossaries rather than doctrinal explanations, which is consistent with their treatment of archaic terms that had ceased to generate active litigation by the time the dictionaries were compiled. For substantive treatment of the market offense, researchers must go to Blackstone directly, early English statute compilations, and secondary histories of market regulation.
Jurisdictional Note
The offense as a criminal matter is English in origin and did not transplant systematically into American law. A handful of early American cases reference the common law tradition, but no American jurisdiction developed forestalling as an independent prosecuted offense. English law formally abolished the offense by statute in 1844. Modern market regulation in both systems proceeds through antitrust and competition law frameworks that are analytically distinct from the forestalling tradition, though historians of economic regulation sometimes trace the lineage.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Forestalling the Market (primary reference for the commercial offense and its statutory history); Market Regulation in English Common Law (for the broader regulatory context including engrossing and regrating).