Definition
Incorporeal chattels are a class of rights that are personal property in legal nature but lack physical existence. They are distinguished from corporeal chattels (tangible movable objects you can touch and hold) by the fact that they consist entirely of legal entitlements — rights that grow out of, or are incident to, personal property rather than being the physical things themselves.
The category traditionally includes patent rights, copyrights, stocks, and personal annuities. What these share is that they are privately enforceable interests in things that have value but no material form. A patent does not exist as a physical object; it is a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention. A copyright similarly is not the manuscript or the printed book — those are corporeal — but the legal right to reproduce and distribute the expression. Stocks represent an ownership interest in a corporate entity, itself an abstraction. Personal annuities are contractual entitlements to periodic payments, enforceable against a person rather than secured against land.
The term maps to the broader distinction between corporeal and incorporeal property, which runs across all property law. In personal property, that line separates chattel real and chattel personal from the intangible rights that attach to or derive from them.
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Common Language
There is no meaningful common-language usage of "incorporeal chattels" as a phrase. "Chattel" in ordinary English simply means a movable item of property (Wiktionary: "a tangible, movable item of personal property"), and Webster's 1913 defined it as "any item of movable or immovable property except the freehold, and things which are parcel of it." The legal term "incorporeal chattels" is technical jargon that would not be encountered outside legal or scholarly writing.
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Common Confusion
INCORPOREAL CHATTELS vs. INCORPOREAL HEREDITAMENTS: These terms are closely related but not interchangeable. Incorporeal hereditaments are incorporeal rights attached to real property — things like easements, profits à prendre, and advowsons — which pass by descent or devise with land. Incorporeal chattels are incorporeal rights attached to personal property. The distinction follows the fundamental division between real and personal property. A copyright is an incorporeal chattel; a right of way over a neighbor's land is an incorporeal hereditament. Researchers in older English sources must track this line carefully because the two categories are governed by entirely different legal rules.
INCORPOREAL CHATTELS vs. INTANGIBLE PROPERTY: Modern law largely replaced the incorporeal/corporeal vocabulary with tangible/intangible, particularly in commercial law and tax. Intangible property is the broader modern category and encompasses what historical law called incorporeal chattels, but also includes goodwill, trade secrets, and other interests not always classified as "rights incident to personal property" under the older framework. The older category is narrower and more technically defined.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term sits at a crossroads of historical taxonomy and modern intellectual property law, and researchers face two distinct navigational challenges.
First, the term is largely obsolete as operative legal vocabulary. Modern statutes governing patents, copyrights, and securities do not use it. If you encounter "incorporeal chattels" in a source, you are almost certainly reading something from the nineteenth century or a treatise influenced by English common law classification. The term is organizational rather than operational — it describes where these rights fit in the property taxonomy, not what rules govern them.
Second, the category itself has expanded and fragmented over time. Bouvier adds stocks and personal annuities to the list that Black's and Burrill restrict to patents and copyrights. Modern intangible personal property encompasses a far larger universe: software licenses, domain names, digital assets, derivatives, and more. Researchers tracing the doctrinal history of any specific intangible right will find it classified under this heading in older sources and under entirely different statutory or common law frameworks in modern ones. The doctrinal continuity is often thin.
For corpus research in Law Mind: when this term appears in a source, note that it signals an English-influenced property taxonomy, likely drawn from or influenced by Stephen's Commentaries (the repeated citation to "2 Steph. Com." across all source dictionaries confirms the shared lineage). It is not a jurisdictionally neutral term — it originates in English common law and was imported into American legal writing through treatise tradition rather than through widespread American judicial adoption. American courts more commonly spoke directly of patent rights or copyrights without deploying the parent category. Treat occurrences as markers of English doctrinal influence rather than as evidence of a distinct body of American caselaw.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The source dictionaries show striking uniformity — almost verbatim agreement across Black's, Burrill, and Rapalje & Lawrence, all tracing directly to Stephen's Commentaries at 2 Steph. Com. 72 (or 9 in different editions). This convergence signals that these dictionaries were drawing from the same tributary rather than independently synthesizing American doctrine. The definition was essentially imported wholesale.
Bouvier's is the most useful outlier. By expanding the list to include stocks and personal annuities alongside patents and copyrights, Bouvier offers the broader conception that better reflects the full range of incorporeal interests in personal property. Bouvier also cites 2 Sandf. 552 — a New York Sandford Reports citation — suggesting some American judicial engagement with the concept, though it remains rare.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is how the category should be treated in litigation, transfer, or succession — questions that became practically significant as patent rights and later securities became economically significant. The dictionaries establish classification but not operational consequence. Researchers should not expect to find, in these entries, guidance on how incorporeal chattels are conveyed, taxed, or enforced; those questions were handled under the specific law of each subspecies.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is a common law category of English origin and was most fully developed in English legal writing. American courts were not uniform in adopting the taxonomy, and it never became embedded in American statutory law. Researchers working in civil law jurisdictions will find no direct analogue; the corporeal/incorporeal distinction exists in civil law property theory but is organized around different doctrinal architecture.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Property Law Encyclopedia — Adverse Possession: Personal Property (Chattels)
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