Definition
"Of Administering Them" is not a standalone legal term but a descriptive phrase used as a section heading or organizational label in equity jurisprudence, referring to the body of equitable doctrines and procedures through which courts of chancery administered relief unavailable at common law. The phrase captures the practical mechanisms — the how — by which equity courts exercised their distinctive jurisdiction over rights, obligations, and remedies.
In context, the phrase refers to the full suite of equitable instruments and doctrines deployed by a court of equity in exercising jurisdiction, including:
(1) Specific performance of contracts — compelling a party to perform a contractual obligation rather than merely paying damages.
(2) Re-execution, reformation, rescission, and cancellation of contracts or instruments — correcting, voiding, or remaking written agreements to reflect the true intent of the parties or to remedy fraud, mistake, or failure of consideration.
(3) Restraint by injunction — prohibiting a party from taking or continuing an action that would cause irreparable harm.
(4) Bills quia timet — equitable actions brought to prevent a threatened or anticipated wrong before actual injury occurs.
(5) Bills of peace — proceedings to settle multiplicity of suits or to resolve a right affecting numerous parties in a single equitable action.
(6) Bills of interpleader — protecting a party with no independent interest who faces competing claims from multiple claimants, compelling those claimants to litigate against one another.
(7) Election between inconsistent legal rights — the equitable doctrine requiring a party to choose between two incompatible rights or remedies, preventing double recovery.
(8) Conversion — the equitable doctrine treating property as already transformed in character (real to personal, or vice versa) when circumstances or obligations require it to be so treated.
(9) Priorities — rules governing the order in which competing equitable and legal claims against property or a fund are satisfied.
(10) Tacking — the equitable doctrine allowing a creditor to combine successive mortgages or security interests to defeat intervening claims, subject to conditions of notice and fairness.
(11) Marshalling of securities — the equitable principle requiring a creditor with access to multiple funds to satisfy its claim in a way that preserves resources for creditors with access to only one of those funds.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this phrase in historical legal texts should understand it as a catalog entry rather than a defined term — it announces a taxonomy of what equity courts did, not a single doctrine. It appears in systematic treatises on equity jurisdiction where authors divided their subject first by the nature of equitable rights and then by the manner of administering or enforcing those rights.
The practical importance for corpus research is navigational: finding this phrase in a historical source signals that the surrounding text will address multiple equitable remedies in a structured, comparative way. Researchers looking for any one of the sub-doctrines listed — marshalling, tacking, quia timet, interpleader — should look to surrounding sections of the same treatise or digest chapter, which will likely treat related remedies in sequence.
A significant trap in historical sources: the boundaries among these doctrines were not always cleanly maintained. Quia timet and bills of peace, for instance, are sometimes treated as subspecies of injunctive relief in later sources and as independent bill-types in earlier ones. The merger of law and equity in most American jurisdictions through the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) and equivalent state-level reforms dissolved many of these procedural distinctions without eliminating the underlying substantive doctrines. A researcher reading a post-merger source about "injunctive relief" may find doctrines that a pre-merger source would have cataloged separately under bills quia timet or bills of peace.
Jurisdictional variation also affects this research area significantly. English Chancery practice and American equity practice diverged over time, and state equity traditions varied further. What Bouvier catalogs under this heading reflects primarily the Anglo-American equity tradition through the mid-nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary presents this phrase as an organizational header within its treatment of equity jurisdiction, listing the major equitable doctrines and remedies that a court of chancery could deploy. The entry is structural rather than definitional — it does not explain any single doctrine but maps the terrain of equitable administration.
Bouvier's treatment reflects the classical division of equity scholarship into the nature of equitable rights (what equity protects) and the modes of administering those rights (how equity acts). This organizational scheme descends from the systematic equity treatises of Story and earlier English Chancery commentators. The list Bouvier provides — specific performance, reformation, injunction, quia timet, peace, interpleader, election, conversion, priorities, tacking, marshalling — closely tracks the table of contents of Story's Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence and similar systematic works of the period.
What historical dictionaries including Bouvier do not fully capture is the procedural transformation that followed merger of law and equity. The "administration" mechanisms described — bills quia timet, bills of peace, bills of interpleader — were specific procedural vehicles tied to the bill-and-answer practice of Chancery. Their modern equivalents (preliminary injunctions, declaratory judgments, modern interpleader under Rule 22) carry forward the substantive principles but in a procedurally transformed form.
Jurisdictional Note
This phrase and the doctrines it catalogs are rooted in the equity jurisdiction of the English Court of Chancery and its American successors. Post-merger American practice has absorbed most of these doctrines into unified civil procedure, though the substantive principles remain operative. Researchers should be alert to whether a source predates or postdates procedural merger in the relevant jurisdiction.