Definition
A pleading term used in common law declarations to aver the defendant's malicious motive or wrongful intent in committing an injurious act. When the motive behind a defendant's conduct is legally material and provable, the pleader was required to allege it — and "intending" (or "wrongfully intending") supplied that averment. The word functions as a term of art in its historical pleading context, signaling that the declaration attributes a culpable mental state to the defendant rather than merely describing the outward act.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The process by which one intends something; intention.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To mean or design (something); to have in mind as a purpose or object.
The ordinary English word captures a mental process — forming a purpose. The legal pleading use is narrower and more formal: "intending" in a declaration is not a description of the defendant's psychology but a required legal averment that formally places malicious or wrongful motive before the court. Its presence or absence in pleading had procedural consequences that the everyday sense of the word does not carry.
Common Confusion
"Intending" as a pleading word should not be confused with intent as a substantive element of a cause of action. Intent — as an element — must be proven at trial. "Intending" in a declaration is the pleading vehicle that puts that element properly in issue. A declaration that omitted the averment where motive was material could be defective even if the underlying facts would support a finding of malice. The distinction is between the allegation (pleading) and the proof (evidence and substantive law).
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-code common law pleading sources — English reporters, early American treatises, colonial and nineteenth-century declarations — will encounter "intending" as a stock formula. Its appearance is a signal that the action sounds in malice or wrongful motive (as in certain trespass, defamation, or malicious prosecution declarations), not merely in negligent or inadvertent conduct. This matters for two reasons.
First, when reading historical pleadings or reported cases that quote declarations, the presence of "wrongfully intending" or "maliciously intending" tells you the plaintiff was required to prove — and the defendant was put on notice to contest — the mental element, not just the act. Strip that averment and the declaration may state a different or weaker cause.
Second, researchers tracing the evolution of intent-based torts will find that the pleading requirement to aver intent (using words like "intending") shaped how courts thought about the substantive law. The pleading tail sometimes wagged the doctrinal dog: if the form required the averment, the substantive question of whether intent was truly required got answered partly through the pleading rules rather than independent doctrinal analysis.
Modern researchers using Law Mind's corpus should also note that this term carries no independent significance in code pleading or modern civil procedure jurisdictions, where fact-pleading replaced the common law forms. Encountering "intending" in a post-Field Code source almost certainly means it is being used in its ordinary English sense, not as a term of art.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary historical dictionary source here, and its treatment is concise but precise. Bouvier correctly locates "intending" within the pleading context — specifically the declaration in tort actions — and correctly identifies its function: to aver motive when motive is provable and material. The cross-reference to Bouvier's Institutes (vol. 3, n. 2875) points toward the broader treatment of pleading in trespass-type actions where malice was an aggravating or constitutive element.
What Bouvier's does not address, and what researchers should supplement from treatises like Chitty on Pleading or Stephen's Principles of Pleading, is the question of when the averment was mandatory versus merely permissible — that is, in which actions the failure to plead "intending" would be held a defect, and in which it was merely surplusage. Bouvier's formulation ("when the motive of the defendant in committing it can be proved") gestures at this but does not resolve it. The word "can" is ambiguous between "is capable of being proved" and "is legally required to be proved."
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus carry a dedicated entry for this term, which itself reflects its status: a pleading formula rather than a freestanding legal concept.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is operative in common law pleading jurisdictions following the English forms of action. American states that adopted code pleading (beginning with New York's Field Code of 1848) largely displaced the technical pleading vocabulary in which "intending" functioned as a term of art. In modern federal and state practice under notice-pleading and plausibility standards, the word carries no special legal charge.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia — Third-Party Beneficiaries: Intended vs. Incidental Beneficiaries: While that entry addresses a distinct doctrinal question (who qualifies as an intended beneficiary for contract enforcement purposes), researchers should note that the concept of "intending" as a marker of purpose and design connects the pleading context to the broader question of how law uses expressed or inferred intention to allocate rights and liabilities. The beneficiary entry uses "intended" in its modern doctrinal sense, not the pleading sense treated here.