Definition
The Forfeitures Abolition Act is a common name for the English statute of 1870 that abolished the ancient common law doctrine under which a person convicted of felony automatically forfeited all personal property and real estate to the Crown. Prior to this reform, felony conviction operated as a kind of civil death in property terms: the felon's estate escheated or was forfeited as a matter of course, leaving heirs and innocent family members without recourse. The 1870 Act ended this automatic consequence, separating criminal punishment from the destruction of property rights in the convicted person's estate.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English legal sources, and researchers encountering it should understand it as a reference point in the longer arc of criminal law reform rather than as a living statute with ongoing interpretive litigation. Several research traps are worth noting.
First, the name is informal. "Forfeitures Abolition Act" is a descriptive label applied by commentators and dictionary compilers, not necessarily the statute's official short title. Researchers should cross-check against the Forfeiture Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict. c. 23) when working from primary sources or parliamentary materials.
Second, the abolition was not total. The 1870 Act removed automatic forfeiture of the felon's entire estate upon conviction, but it did not eliminate all forms of criminal forfeiture from English law. Specific statutory forfeitures tied to particular offenses continued, and modern civil and criminal asset forfeiture regimes have expanded considerably in both England and jurisdictions influenced by English law. Researchers conflating "forfeitures abolished in 1870" with "forfeitures abolished generally" will misread both historical and modern sources.
Third, the act has significant corpus connections to American legal history. American states, drawing on English common law, inherited the forfeiture-on-felony doctrine. The pace of American reform varied: some states abolished it by constitution or statute well before 1870, others retained modified versions longer. When American treatise writers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cite the Forfeitures Abolition Act or the English reform, they are often doing so comparatively, either to argue for American reform or to note that American law had already diverged. Researchers working in American criminal law sources from this period should read such references as comparative markers, not as statements of American law.
Fourth, the Act intersects with the broader subject of attainder and corruption of blood. Felony forfeiture and corruption of blood (which barred inheritance through a convicted felon) were conceptually linked but legally distinct. The 1870 Act addressed property forfeiture; corruption of blood had been addressed by earlier English reforms and was separately prohibited in the United States Constitution. Sources sometimes discuss these together, and researchers should distinguish which doctrine a given passage addresses.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary identifies the Forfeitures Abolition Act as "another name for the felony act of 1870, abolishing forfeitures for felony in England." The entry is brief and descriptive, serving primarily as a cross-reference signal rather than an analytical treatment. It correctly identifies the statute's essential purpose and its English jurisdiction, which is the most important orienting information for a researcher encountering the term in historical materials.
What Black's does not address is the doctrinal context surrounding the Act: the long common law history of felony forfeiture, the earlier reforms that had already narrowed the doctrine, or the ways in which American jurisdictions had independently addressed the same issue. Researchers who need more than the identification function should treat Black's entry as a starting point and move to English legal history sources for the fuller picture.
The adjacent entry in Black's — FORGABULUM or FORGAVEL, a quit-rent — is alphabetically proximate but doctrinally unrelated. Its appearance in historical dictionaries immediately after the Forfeitures Abolition Act entry is an artifact of alphabetical arrangement and should not suggest any legal relationship between the two concepts.
Jurisdictional Note
The Forfeitures Abolition Act is exclusively an English statute. American researchers will find the term in comparative legal writing and in treatises discussing the English common law background of American criminal law, but the Act itself has no direct American legal force. American forfeiture reform occurred jurisdiction by jurisdiction, through state constitutions, statutes, and the federal constitutional prohibition on corruption of blood and forfeiture for treason beyond the life of the offender.