Definition
Things capable of being moved; the class of property that may be carried from place to place and that attaches to the person of the owner rather than to land. In legal usage, moveables encompasses the full range of personal chattels — inanimate objects such as goods, plate, money, jewels, garments, weapons, and implements — as well as, in historical classifications, animate things including domestic animals and, under older law, certain categories of persons.
The term functions as a broad organizing category in property law, distinguishing property that follows the owner from property that is fixed to a location (immoveables). It is more common in civil law systems and in older common law writing than in modern Anglo-American practice, where "personal property" or "chattels" now carries the equivalent weight.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "moveable" — things that can be physically moved.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Consistent with the ordinary sense: objects capable of being moved from place to place.
The gap between common and legal meaning is not one of opposition but of precision. Ordinary usage describes a physical capacity; legal usage describes a property classification with doctrinal consequences — for inheritance, taxation, conflict of laws, and creditors' rights. A thing may be physically moveable yet legally classified as an immoveable (a fixture, for example), and the reverse can occur under certain civil law rules. The legal category is not coextensive with the physical description.
Common Confusion
MOVEABLES vs. PERSONAL PROPERTY: In modern common law systems these concepts largely overlap, but the terminology is not interchangeable across legal traditions. "Moveables" is the preferred term in Scots law, civilian systems, and much of the older English legal literature. "Personal property" is the standard modern Anglo-American term. A researcher moving between jurisdictions or across time periods may encounter the same underlying category under different names, and should not assume that every attribute of one maps perfectly onto the other.
MOVEABLES vs. CHATTELS: "Chattels" is the common law term of art most closely equivalent to moveables, but chattels carries its own internal distinctions (chattels real vs. chattels personal) that the moveables/immoveables binary does not replicate. Conflating the two frameworks can produce errors in historical research.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Historical classifications divided moveables into two principal branches:
Inanimate moveables: goods, plate, money, jewels, garments, implements of war, documents. These are the core of the category in both civil and common law traditions.
Animate moveables: domestic animals and livestock. In older civilian and English sources, this subcategory was formally recognized. Burrill's entry references Britton's treatment, which extends the list to "dumb animals" — meaning animals incapable of speech, not animals that are silent, reflecting archaic usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter "moveables" most heavily in three contexts: (1) historical English common law sources drawing on Blackstone and the earlier Year Book tradition; (2) Scots law materials, where the moveables/immoveables distinction remains the operative framework today; and (3) conflict of laws analysis, where the question of which jurisdiction's law governs a decedent's property historically turned on the moveable/immoveable classification.
The critical trap is temporal. Pre-nineteenth-century English sources use "moveables" as a primary organizing term. Modern Anglo-American sources have largely abandoned it in favor of "personal property." A researcher searching only for "personal property" in early sources will miss substantial material; a researcher searching only for "moveables" in modern sources will find the term confined to comparative, historical, or conflict-of-laws contexts.
Jurisdictional displacement is the second trap. In Scots law, Louisiana law, Quebec law, and most civilian systems, the moveables/immoveables binary remains doctrinally live. Authorities from those jurisdictions will use this vocabulary in ways that look archaic in a common law context but are current law in their own systems.
The animate subcategory — particularly the historical inclusion of persons among moveables — requires careful handling. Enslaved persons were legally classified as moveable property in American law prior to abolition, and this classification had direct doctrinal consequences for inheritance, creditors' claims, and conflict of laws. Sources from that period will reflect this classification without the modern reader's moral context. Researchers should approach such material analytically rather than anachronistically.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is compact but well-grounded. His definition tracks Blackstone (2 Bl. Com. 387) closely: moveables are things "which may be annexed to, or attendant on the person of the owner, and carried about with him from one part of the world to another." This framing emphasizes the personal, portable character of the property and implicitly signals the conflict-of-laws consequence — that the law of the owner's domicile, not the law of a fixed location, governs such property.
Burrill also cites Britton (c. 34) for the enumerated subtypes, giving the entry roots in medieval English law. The list — goods, plate, money, jewels, implements of war, garments — reappears across centuries of legal writing with little variation, which itself signals that the category was treated as settled rather than contested.
What Burrill's entry does not address is the significance of the moveable/immoveable distinction for succession law and conflict of laws doctrine, which by the nineteenth century had become the primary context in which the term did real legal work. Researchers needing that dimension should extend their search to treatises on private international law and to Scots institutional writers (Stair, Erskine, Bell) who developed the framework most systematically.
Jurisdictional Note
In Scots law and civilian systems (including Louisiana and Quebec), moveables and immoveables remain the foundational property classification, with active doctrinal consequences for succession, security interests, and conflict of laws. In English and most American common law jurisdictions, the terminology has been replaced by personal property and real property, though the underlying distinction persists. Researchers should not assume that a rule stated for "moveables" in a Scottish or civilian source applies without translation to common law jurisdictions, or vice versa.