Definition
Personalty is all property that is not real property (realty). It encompasses every form of movable, tangible or intangible property that the law treats as personal rather than landed. The term functions as an abstract noun parallel to "realty" — just as realty names the category of land and interests in land, personalty names the category of everything else.
Two principal meanings operate in legal sources:
1. Personal property generally. Personalty includes physical, movable objects (chattels real and chattels personal), intangible rights (choses in action, debts, intellectual property), and certain interests that arise out of or are attached to real property but which the law classifies as personal — such as a tenant's trade fixtures or industrial crops (emblements). The governing principle is not physical movability alone but legal classification: some personalty is physically attached to land yet treated by law as movable; some is purely incorporeal.
2. Old practice usage. In early English practice, an action was said to lie "in the personalty" when it was correctly brought against the proper defendant — the person against whom the action lay at law. This usage is archaic and appears almost exclusively in pre-19th-century sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Any property that is movable, as distinguished from real estate; also, the property passing to an executor or administrator on death, as opposed to realty passing to heirs.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Personal property as distinguished from realty or real property; also, rarely, the state of being a person.
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical. The common definition correctly captures the movable/land distinction, but legal personalty includes intangible property — choses in action, stock, negotiable instruments — that is not "movable" in any physical sense. A researcher relying only on the ordinary meaning may undercount what falls within personalty in a legal instrument or estate.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Quasi-personalty: Things that are legally movable but are physically fixed to realty, or that are connected with and issuing out of real property. Examples include tenant's fixtures removable at the end of a tenancy, emblements (crops produced by annual labor), and certain profits issuing from land. Black's 2nd Edition flags this subtype explicitly. It matters because quasi-personalty straddles the realty/personalty boundary and can generate classification disputes in conveyancing, probate, and security instruments.
Why It Matters in Research
The realty/personalty distinction is foundational to property law, probate law, and conflict of laws, and researchers encounter it across centuries of materials with shifting boundary lines.
Probate and succession: Historically, realty and personalty descended by entirely different rules. Realty passed to heirs at law under rules of descent; personalty passed to the executor or administrator for distribution. This bifurcation appears throughout pre-20th-century wills, estate inventories, and probate records. A term like "personal estate" in an 18th- or 19th-century will means personalty in this technical sense, not merely property of a personal nature.
Fixtures and the realty/personalty boundary: The classification of fixtures — whether a given object attached to land is realty or personalty — has been litigated extensively and varies by context (landlord-tenant, mortgage, sale of goods, taxation). A fixture may be personalty as between a tenant and landlord, but realty as between a mortgagor and mortgagee. Historical sources often treat this inconsistently.
Conflict of laws: The law governing personalty has traditionally been the law of the owner's domicile (mobilia sequuntur personam), while realty is governed by the law of the situs. This choice-of-law rule is deeply embedded in older treatises and international private law materials, and researchers tracing cross-border estate or property disputes will encounter it constantly.
Intangibles: Burrill's entry notably extends personalty to things "not tangible, such as choses in action." Earlier common-law sources sometimes treated choses in action as a separate or lesser category of property. Modern personalty unambiguously includes all intangibles — patents, copyrights, debts, digital assets — but historical sources may not, and researchers should not assume continuity.
The old practice meaning (action "in the personalty") is now purely historical. It appears in Fitzherbert's Old Natura Brevium and related early sources. Do not conflate it with the property classification meaning when reading pre-modern pleading texts.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree on the core meaning: personalty equals personal property, movable property, chattels. Bouvier and Burrill offer the most analytically useful entries. Bouvier's definition — "that which is movable; that which is the subject of personal property and not of real property" — captures the defining negative: personalty is what realty is not. Burrill extends this helpfully to cover intangibles (choses in action) and quasi-movables (tenant's fixtures), making his entry the most complete among the shelf sources for understanding the term's full legal scope.
Black's 1st Edition preserves the archaic practice usage (action "in the personalty") alongside the property meaning, a pairing that reflects the term's dual history but can confuse researchers who encounter the practice usage without context. Black's 2nd Edition adds the quasi-personalty subtype, which is absent from the earlier edition and from Rapalje & Lawrence entirely.
Rapalje & Lawrence gives only a bare cross-reference to "personal property," contributing nothing beyond the redirect. Researchers relying solely on that source will need to follow the cross-reference to get any substantive analysis.
None of the historical dictionaries adequately addresses intangible personalty in the modern sense — intellectual property, financial instruments, or digital assets. These categories must be understood through modern doctrine layered onto the historical framework the dictionaries provide.
Jurisdictional Note
American law generally follows the historical realty/personalty distinction, but the specific rules governing fixtures, emblements, and the transmission of personal property at death vary by state. Louisiana's civil-law tradition uses different classificatory terms and categories. In secured transactions, Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code has largely displaced common-law personalty classifications for personal property used as collateral, creating a separate statutory vocabulary that operates alongside rather than replacing the traditional terms.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Personal Property; Chattels; Fixtures (Property Law); Conflict of Laws — Choice of Law in Property