Definition
A Latin term from the Roman law of obligations referring to a letting of work for the carriage of goods — specifically, a contract of bailment in which goods are delivered to a person to be carried for hire. Hendarum is a subspecies of locatio conductio (the broader Roman lease-and-hire contract), applied to the particular case where the subject of the hire is the performance of transport services. The carrier who receives the goods becomes a bailee for hire and, under classical doctrine, assumes responsibility for their safe delivery.
Common Confusion
Hendarum is sometimes encountered in older treatises alongside locatio operis and locatio operarum without clear distinction. Locatio operarum is a hire of personal labor generally; locatio operis is a hire of a specific result or work-product. Hendarum falls within locatio operis — the carrier is engaged to accomplish a result (delivery), not merely to supply labor. Researchers encountering these Latin terms in historical sources should not treat them as interchangeable; the distinction bears on what duties and liabilities attached to the hired party under Roman and early common law analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
Hendarum is essentially a citation artifact — it appears almost exclusively in nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries and treatises that drew on Roman and civil law to systematize the common law of bailment. Its practical significance lies not in modern doctrine but as a gateway into the historical literature on carrier liability.
The term surfaces in the foundational American bailment scholarship of Kent and Story. Researchers tracing the development of common carrier doctrine — particularly the strict liability rule for carriers, the innkeeper analogy, and the "act of God" and "public enemy" exceptions — will encounter hendarum as the Roman-law framing that these authors used to justify and organize Anglo-American rules. Understanding the term allows a researcher to follow the intellectual lineage from Roman locatio conductio through Kent and Story into the mid-nineteenth-century case law on freight and shipping contracts.
A key research trap: because hendarum appears almost nowhere in case law directly, a full-text search of judicial opinions will largely fail. The term lives in treatise literature and law review commentary on the history of bailment. Researchers should search instead for Kent's Commentaries volume 2 and Story's Commentaries on the Law of Bailments as the primary nodes, then move outward into the secondary cases those works generated.
Jurisdictional variation in carrier liability rules — especially between admiralty, inland waterway, and overland carriage — means the Roman-law framework underlying hendarum was applied unevenly in American courts. Common law courts adapting Story's framework sometimes imported the Roman distinctions with modification; others ignored the civil law lineage entirely and developed carrier liability on purely common law grounds. Researchers should not assume that an American court citing Story on hendarum was adopting the full Roman framework.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary offer identical substantive entries, both citing Kent's Commentaries and Story's Bailments as authority. The precise agreement between them is itself informative: it suggests both were drawing from a common secondary source rather than independent analysis, and that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, hendarum had already become a term of art preserved for doctrinal completeness rather than active judicial use.
Neither dictionary provides a working definition of the carrier's duties or liabilities under hendarum beyond identifying the contractual structure. For the substantive obligations — the degree of care required, the defenses available, the effect of special contracts limiting liability — researchers must go directly to Story's Bailments sections 370 and 457 and Kent's Commentaries volume 2, page 597. Those sources remain the authoritative primary texts for what hendarum entailed in nineteenth-century American legal thought.
Neither Black's nor Burrill addresses the relationship between hendarum and the developing law of common carriers as a distinct common law status, which is a significant gap. By the mid-nineteenth century, American courts were building a body of common carrier law that had largely outgrown the Roman-law framing; the dictionaries preserve the term without acknowledging this displacement.