Definition
FUR carries two distinct legal meanings depending on the legal tradition in which it appears.
1. (Property / Commercial Law) Skins of animals valued primarily for their soft, dense hair; pelts or peltry used in trade and commerce. In this sense, fur is distinguished from "skins" (valued for the underlying hide) and "hides" (the tanned or raw skin of larger animals such as cattle). The distinction matters in commercial and insurance contexts: a cargo or shipment described as "fur" may include bearskins, deerskins, and similar pelts where trade custom treats the soft hair as the source of value, even if those items might colloquially be called "skins."
2. (Roman / Civil Law) A thief — specifically, one who steals secretly, by stealth, or without the use of force or weapons. The Latin term fur is the civil law's designation for the ordinary thief, as contrasted with the robber (latro), who employs force or violence.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The soft, dense hair of certain animals; by extension, the pelt or skin bearing that hair, or garments made from it.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The short, fine, soft hair of certain animals, growing thick on the skin"; also the dressed pelts themselves or garments fashioned from them.
Editorial note: The common meaning of fur (soft animal hair or pelt) aligns reasonably well with the commercial-law usage in sense 1, but the alignment is imprecise. Trade law drew careful distinctions among fur, skins, and hides that ordinary language collapses. More sharply, sense 2 — the Latin fur meaning "thief" — has no relationship to the common English word. Researchers encountering fur in a civil law or Roman law source should not assume it refers to pelts.
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Common Confusion
The two definitions share nothing but spelling and should not be conflated. A reader moving between common-law commercial sources and civil law texts must treat fur as a false friend: in Roman and civil law writing, fur is a person, not a commodity. Additionally, within the commercial sense, fur must be carefully distinguished from skins and hides; courts and insurers have held that these terms are not interchangeable, and a policy or contract covering one category does not necessarily reach the others.
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Why It Matters in Research
The bifurcation of this term across legal traditions creates a genuine research trap. Civil law treatises, digests of Roman law, and early American works drawing on civilian sources will use fur to mean thief — particularly in discussions of theft (furtum), the Roman law of delict, and the distinction between manifest and non-manifest theft (fur manifestus vs. fur nec manifestus). Researchers in those sources who assume fur refers to animal pelts will misread the text entirely.
In the commercial and insurance context, the distinction between fur, skins, and hides became a point of active litigation in early American courts. The rule that emerged — that trade custom governs the scope of these terms in commercial instruments — means that historical dictionaries alone cannot settle what a particular contract or policy covered. Evidence of mercantile usage in the relevant time and place was essential, and courts admitted such evidence over objection. Researchers analyzing insurance disputes, cargo contracts, or tariff classifications from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should look for extrinsic evidence of trade custom rather than relying on the bare dictionary meaning of the term.
The fur trade was also a significant regulatory subject in colonial and early American law — touching customs duties, Indian trade regulations, and property rights in peltry — so fur as a commercial term appears across a wide range of legal instruments beyond simple contracts.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is the most practically useful, establishing the commercial sense and directly addressing the fur/skins/hides distinction with reference to New York case law. Bouvier is explicit that "hides" is inapplicable to fur skins, and that trade usage could expand "fur" to include bearskins and deerskins even where those items might otherwise be described differently. This is the clearest historical dictionary treatment of the term's commercial meaning.
Black's (2nd Ed.) covers only the civil law sense — fur as thief — and provides the important subcategory fur manifestus (a thief caught in the act of stealing), which carried distinct legal consequences under Roman law. Black's treatment situates the term correctly within delict doctrine but does not address the commercial meaning at all.
Burrill's entry, as reproduced in the available source material, does not contain a discrete entry for fur; the excerpt relates to foundatio. Burrill therefore adds nothing directly to this term.
The historical dictionaries collectively do not address the regulatory dimensions of the fur trade (customs, colonial licensing, treaty rights), which are a significant context for the term's appearance in American legal records. Researchers should treat the dictionaries as incomplete on that dimension.
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Jurisdictional Note
The commercial distinction between fur, skins, and hides was litigated primarily in American commercial courts in the early nineteenth century, with New York courts (given New York's role as a center of the pelt trade) producing some of the leading decisions. Civil law usage of fur as "thief" is not jurisdiction-specific but is confined to civilian and Roman law sources; it does not appear in this sense in common law materials.
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