Definition
Misdelivery is the delivery of property by a carrier or warehouseman to a person not authorized to receive it — either because that person is not the owner or because they are not the party designated by the contract of carriage or storage. The wrong can arise from delivering to the wrong person entirely, to someone without proper documentation (such as a bill of lading), or at the wrong location when destination determines the authorized recipient.
Misdelivery is treated as an absolute liability event in most carrier law contexts: once a carrier delivers to the wrong party, it is generally liable to the true owner or consignee regardless of good faith or negligence. This distinguishes misdelivery from loss or damage claims, where fault or negligence frameworks often apply.
The concept extends beyond common carriers. A warehouseman who releases goods to someone other than the depositor or lawful holder of a warehouse receipt commits misdelivery subject to substantially the same consequences.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "an incorrect delivery, e.g. to the wrong person."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not defined as a standalone entry; the concept would have been understood simply as a failure to deliver correctly.
Editorial note: The ordinary meaning captures the physical act accurately but misses the legal weight entirely. In law, misdelivery is not merely an error to be corrected — it triggers strict liability in most carrier and warehouse contexts, and it can constitute conversion. A shipper who learns their package went to the wrong address thinks "mistake"; a lawyer sees a completed tort.
Core Elements
For a misdelivery claim in the carrier or warehouse context, the following elements are typically required:
1. A bailment or contract of carriage. The carrier or warehouseman must have received the property and undertaken an obligation to deliver it to a specified party or destination.
2. Delivery occurred. The goods were physically transferred to someone. Mere loss or non-delivery is a separate claim; misdelivery requires that delivery happened — just to the wrong party.
3. The recipient was unauthorized. The person who received the goods was not the owner, consignee, or holder of a valid document of title (such as a negotiable bill of lading or warehouse receipt) entitling them to possession.
4. Resulting harm. The true owner or rightful consignee was deprived of the property. Proof of actual loss is generally required for damages, though liability itself may be strict.
Why It Matters in Research
Misdelivery sits at the intersection of carrier law, bailment, and conversion, and researchers must be careful not to conflate these threads when working through historical sources.
The strict liability character of misdelivery is the key research point. Unlike damage or delay claims — where carriers historically enjoyed defenses under common law and later under regulatory regimes — misdelivery to the wrong party was treated as something close to conversion, stripping carriers of most defenses. When tracing this in older cases and treatises, watch for courts using "conversion" and "misdelivery" interchangeably or as alternative theories on the same facts.
The bill of lading is the central document. In negotiable bill of lading cases, the authorized recipient is whoever holds the document — not whoever claims to be the consignee by name. Historical sources may assume the reader already understands this document-of-title mechanics; modern researchers should connect misdelivery doctrine to the corpus entries on bills of lading and documents of title before working through older freight and warehouse disputes.
Warehousemen receive less attention than carriers in many historical dictionaries (Anderson's simply cross-references DELIVERY), but the same core rule applied to them. The Uniform Warehouse Receipts Act (early 20th century) and later the Uniform Commercial Code formalized warehouse liability for misdelivery; researchers examining pre-UCC materials will find the doctrine developing through common law case-by-case rather than statute.
Jurisdictional variation in the remedy is worth noting. Some historical sources treat misdelivery as sounding in contract (breach of the carriage obligation); others frame it in tort (conversion or trover). The chosen theory affected available damages, statutes of limitation, and defenses. Federal cases involving interstate carriers add another layer once federal regulatory law enters the picture.
The single Massachusetts citation (133 Mass. 156) appears in both Black's editions and Bouvier without further elaboration — researchers who encounter this cite repeatedly should treat it as foundational but not as the full picture of how the doctrine developed.
Historical Dictionary Support
The major historical dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier define misdelivery identically, with near-identical language: delivery to a person not authorized by the owner or by the contract of carriage. All three substantive sources cite the same Massachusetts authority. Anderson's adds nothing, redirecting to DELIVERY without elaboration.
The agreement reflects how settled the core concept was by the late nineteenth century. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the liability consequence — none of them explicitly state that misdelivery triggers strict liability or that good faith is no defense. That silence is instructive: the treatise writers of the era apparently regarded those consequences as sufficiently well understood to require no statement. Modern researchers should not read the brevity of these definitions as suggesting misdelivery was a minor or ambiguous concept; it was the opposite.
The historical dictionaries also omit the warehouseman's role almost entirely in the definitional entries, though warehouse liability for misdelivery was well established in practice. The focus on carriers reflects the commercial centrality of freight and shipping in the period.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal law governs misdelivery claims against interstate carriers under the Carmack Amendment framework, which preempts state law remedies in many situations. State law continues to govern purely intrastate carriage and warehouse misdelivery claims, though most states adopted substantially uniform rules through the UCC and predecessor uniform acts. Researchers should determine the interstate or intrastate character of the shipment before selecting the applicable body of law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Carriers (for the duty of delivery and liability rules); Bailment (for the general framework governing possession and return obligations); Warehousemen (for the parallel liability rules outside the carrier context); Bills of Lading (for the document-of-title mechanics that define the authorized recipient).