Definition
In legal usage, "lie" is a verb meaning to be maintainable, sustainable, or available as a matter of law. It is most commonly encountered in the phrase "an action lies" or "an action will not lie," signifying that a cause of action is or is not legally cognizable — that is, whether sufficient legal grounds exist to support it.
The term carries three distinct legal senses:
1. To be maintainable (of an action or remedy): A claim, appeal, writ, or other legal proceeding "lies" when it is properly available under the applicable law. Conversely, it "will not lie" when no legal basis supports it — whether because the facts do not support the cause of action, the forum is improper, or the remedy is unavailable in that context.
2. To exist or subsist (of a right or interest): A right or legal interest is said to "lie in" a particular mode of creation or transfer. An incorporeal right (such as an easement or profit) is said to lie in grant, meaning it can only be created by a written instrument. A corporeal right lies in livery or deed, reflecting older common law conveyancing distinctions. Property is said to lie in franchise when the holder may seize or assert it without resort to court process.
3. As a noun: A willful untruth; a deliberate falsehood. In this sense the term appears in the law of defamation, perjury-adjacent contexts, and occasionally in pleadings or charges. Anderson's notes the important limitation: calling a person's sworn statement a "lie" does not itself constitute a legal charge of perjury.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To rest in a horizontal position; to be placed or situated; to abide or remain; to consist or have an abiding place (used with "in"); to lodge.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 redirects entirely to "Lye," reflecting that the dictionary treated the verb "lie" as self-evident — a word too ordinary to require definition.
The gap between common and legal meaning is stark and traps the inattentive reader. In ordinary English, "lie" most frequently means either to recline or to tell a falsehood. In legal texts — particularly older treatises, writs, and judicial opinions — it almost always means to be legally maintainable or available. The phrase "no action will lie" has nothing to do with deception or posture; it is a term of art foreclosing a remedy. Readers encountering this usage in historical sources without that context will systematically misread it.
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Common Confusion
The noun sense of "lie" (a falsehood) and the verb sense of "lie" (to be maintainable) are formally unrelated but share identical spelling, which creates confusion in older legal texts where both appear. A charge that a witness "swore to a lie" is not a perjury charge — a point Bouvier's explicitly flags. Separately, the incorporeal/corporeal distinction embedded in the phrase "lie in grant" versus "lie in deed" or "lie in livery" is frequently collapsed or ignored in secondary literature, erasing meaningful distinctions in property and conveyancing law.
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Why It Matters in Research
The verb sense of "lie" as "to be maintainable" saturates pre-twentieth-century legal writing. Judicial opinions, treatises, writs, and pleadings from the common law tradition use it constantly, often without explanation because it was assumed knowledge. Researchers working in historical sources — particularly English common law materials, early American equity practice, or colonial-era records — will encounter it on virtually every page. Misreading it as a reference to falsehood produces nonsensical results.
The phrase structure matters: "lies" and "will lie" are positive; "will not lie," "does not lie," and "cannot lie" are negative. The negative construction is particularly important: courts used "the action will not lie" as a shorthand for dismissal on legal grounds, functioning as an early precursor to what modern practitioners would recognize as a ruling on the sufficiency of a claim.
The "lie in franchise / lie in grant / lie in deed" cluster connects directly to the Law Mind corpus's materials on conveyancing, incorporeal hereditaments, and feudal tenure. These phrases encode the common law's distinction between rights that transfer by delivery of possession and rights that can only be created or transferred in writing. That distinction has survived in modified form into modern real property law, particularly in the treatment of easements and profits.
Researchers should also note that Bouvier's treatment of "lie" bleeds immediately into the entry on "liege," a structural artifact of alphabetical organization that can cause source confusion when reading scanned or transcribed historical dictionaries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources converge cleanly on the primary verb sense. Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Anderson's are in full agreement: "lie" means to subsist, exist, or be sustainable, and the paradigm case is an action that "lies" or "will not lie." This unanimity across sources signals a stable, well-settled term of art rather than a contested or evolving one.
Anderson's is the most analytically complete entry, distinguishing three sub-senses — maintainability of an action, existence of an incorporeal right, and concealment (as in "lie in wait") — and adding the noun sense (a willful untruth) with a cross-reference to deceit and estoppel. It is the only source in the set to treat the noun sense as part of the same entry rather than a separate headword, a useful consolidation.
Burrill's entry, as reproduced here, does not address "lie" directly; the excerpt concerns a maxim about permission and greater/lesser acts, suggesting the relevant portion of Burrill's entry was not captured in the source extract.
What the historical sources collectively underserve: the "lie in franchise / lie in grant / lie in deed / lie in livery" cluster receives mention in Black's (2nd ed.) and Rapalje & Lawrence but is not developed in detail. For full treatment of those distinctions researchers must move to the conveyancing and property entries, particularly GRANT and FRANCHISE, in the historical dictionaries and associated treatises.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Forms of Action; Incorporeal Hereditaments; Conveyancing (Historical).
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