Definition
Capable of being replevied; that is, capable of being recovered or released through the remedy of replevin. The term describes property or persons whose legal character permits the application of replevin proceedings — chiefly, goods and chattels wrongfully taken or detained, which may be reclaimed by the owner upon giving sufficient surety to prosecute the action and return the property if the court so requires.
Historically, not all distrained or detained goods were pleviable. Certain categories were held non-pleviable as a matter of law, including goods taken in the king's name for Crown debts, beasts caught doing damage (distress damage feasant) in some formulations, and property held under specific statutory authority that displaced the common law replevin right.
Common Confusion
PLEVIABLE vs. REPLEVISABLE: These terms are used interchangeably in many older sources, and the distinction — if one ever existed — is not consistently maintained. Both describe property subject to recovery by replevin. Researchers encountering either form in historical documents should treat them as equivalent unless the source makes an explicit distinction.
PLEVIABLE vs. BAILABLE: In older usage touching the replevin of persons (as in certain debt proceedings), pleviable was sometimes loosely paralleled with bailable in the criminal context. The mechanisms are analogous — surety given in exchange for release — but they operate in entirely separate procedural tracks and should not be conflated.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow, procedurally specific term that appears almost exclusively in older English and early American common law materials concerning replevin and distraint. Researchers will encounter it most often in:
— Treatises on personal property and distress, where the pleviable/non-pleviable distinction controls whether the replevin writ would lie at all.
— Pleading manuals addressing the formal requirements of replevin actions, where establishing that the goods were pleviable was a threshold matter.
— Cases involving Crown or government seizure, where the non-pleviable character of certain property was a jurisdictional defense to replevin.
The term is largely absent from modern American legal writing. Replevin survives in American courts but the vocabulary has modernized; practitioners and statutes typically speak of whether goods are "subject to replevin" rather than whether they are "pleviable." When reading 18th- or 19th-century English materials in the Law Mind corpus, the term signals that the author is analyzing the threshold question of replevin availability, not the merits of the underlying taking.
Note that the surviving Rapalje & Lawrence entry excerpt references usage in pleading in the English High Court. This flags that the term carried procedural significance in formal pleading, not merely descriptive significance — a relevant distinction when analyzing whether historical courts treated pleviability as a pleaded element or a background assumption.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence identify two distinct usages, though the available excerpt surfaces only the pleading context (usage in an action in the English High Court). This suggests the editors recognized both a substantive sense — describing the character of the property — and a procedural/pleading sense, in which the pleviable nature of the goods required affirmative assertion or was subject to traverse by the opposing party.
Earlier English legal dictionaries, including Termes de la Ley and Jacob's Law Dictionary, use cognate forms (replevishable, replevisable) to convey the same concept, reflecting the term's roots in Norman French legal vocabulary. The variation in spelling across historical sources is common and does not signal a difference in meaning. Researchers consulting pre-19th-century sources should search multiple spelling variants.
What historical dictionaries collectively do not address is how American courts adapted the pleviable/non-pleviable distinction as replevin was codified by state statute in the 19th century. The common law categories of non-pleviable property did not map cleanly onto statutory replevin regimes, and American cases frequently ignored or modified them. Historical dictionary definitions are therefore a reliable guide to English common law usage but an unreliable guide to American practice after codification.
Jurisdictional Note
The pleviable/non-pleviable distinction was developed under English common law and is most reliably traced through English sources. American jurisdictions that codified replevin by statute largely displaced the common law vocabulary, and the term pleviable rarely appears in American statutory text. Research in early American state materials may find the term in cases self-consciously applying English common law before local codification.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: REPLEVIN