Definition
POUND carries two distinct legal meanings that share no substantive connection beyond the word itself.
1. An enclosure established by public authority for the temporary detention of stray or wandering animals found on public ways or lands. The pound is the physical facility through which the legal remedy of impoundment is exercised. Historically, pound law governed the rights of landowners to detain animals found trespassing on their property as well as the rights of public officers to seize animals running at large in violation of local ordinances or statutes. The owner of impounded animals must typically pay fees, penalties, or the costs of care before the animals are released.
Pound-overt: A pound that is open overhead — essentially an open pen or enclosure.
Pound-covert: A pound that is covered or enclosed, such as a stable or building. The distinction matters historically because a pound-covert provided shelter and thus imposed different duties of care on the pounder.
2. A unit of weight recognized in commerce and by statute. Two standard versions exist in Anglo-American law: the pound avoirdupois (16 ounces; 7,000 grains), used for general commercial goods, and the pound troy (12 ounces; 5,760 grains), used for precious metals and pharmaceuticals. Statutory definitions of the pound as a standard weight have appeared in state and federal law since the early republic, typically anchoring the pound to a physical reference standard — such as the weight of a defined volume of distilled water at a specified temperature.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A place for the detention of stray or wandering animals; also extended to automobile impoundment facilities; a section of a canal between two locks; a type of fishing enclosure; and as a verb, to strike repeatedly or to pulverize.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): As a verb — to strike repeatedly with a heavy instrument; to beat or bruise into fine particles.
The gap worth noting: The verb "to pound" (to strike or pulverize) and the noun "pound" (an enclosure) share an etymology but diverge completely in legal usage. Legal sources use pound exclusively as a noun referring to the enclosure or the unit of weight. A researcher encountering "pound" as a verb in a legal document is almost certainly not reading a term of art — it is ordinary English. The currency sense (British pound sterling) also appears in historical commercial law documents and can create confusion in sources that address debts, fines, or penalties denominated in pre-independence colonial currency.
Common Confusion
Pound (enclosure) vs. impoundment: The pound is the place; impoundment is the legal act of seizing and confining. Statutes and older cases sometimes use pound loosely to describe the process rather than the facility, so context is required.
Pound avoirdupois vs. pound troy: These are not interchangeable. Commercial contracts, customs records, and pharmacy regulations may specify one or the other. Confusion between the two creates real discrepancies: the troy pound is roughly 82% the weight of the avoirdupois pound. Historical sources do not always flag which is intended.
Pound (weight) vs. pound (currency): In colonial-era documents and early American legal instruments, "pound" may refer to the British pound sterling or to colonial currency denominated in pounds. This is a third meaning entirely separate from the two legal definitions above and appears only in monetary contexts.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Pound-overt: Open enclosure; animals exposed to the elements.
Pound-covert: Covered enclosure; imposes heightened duty of care on the keeper.
Public pound: Operated by governmental authority, typically a municipality or county.
Private pound (pound de damage feasant): Historically, a landowner's right to detain animals that had trespassed and caused damage on their land, without using a public facility — effectively holding the animals as security until compensation was paid. This practice was recognized in common law but is substantially abolished or regulated by statute in American jurisdictions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter "pound" in at least three distinct documentary contexts, and conflating them produces research errors.
In animal control and property law sources, pound appears in cases involving the legality of impoundment, owner redemption rights, and municipal liability for animals injured or lost while in custody. The threshold question in historical cases is almost always whether the animals were lawfully "at large" under the controlling statute — the cases cited in Bouvier (running at large, strict statutory construction) signal that historical pound law was highly fact-specific and jurisdiction-dependent.
In weights and measures law, pound appears in commercial disputes, customs records, tariff schedules, and state statutory compilations. Early American sources frequently reference New York's statutory standard as a reference point, but other states adopted different standards. Federal standardization came gradually; researchers relying on pre-federal-standardization sources must identify the applicable state standard.
The pound de damage feasant subtype is particularly important for researchers in English legal history and early American property law. It appears in common law treatises and early equity cases but is substantially displaced by modern animal control statutes. Treating historical pound-de-damage-feasant doctrine as current law is a frequent trap in secondary sources that do not track statutory abolition.
Colonial and early American currency records denominated in pounds require a separate research path entirely — into monetary history, colonial finance law, and conversion tables — not into animal control or weights law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) treats the two primary meanings — enclosure and unit of weight — as co-equal definitions under a single entry, which accurately reflects how the word functions across legal contexts. The pound-overt/pound-covert distinction appears in both editions, signaling its doctrinal relevance to the duty-of-care question in historical impoundment cases.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary goes further on the enclosure meaning, adding the substantive legal rule: animals may not be impounded unless they are "suffered by the owner to run at large" within the strict meaning of the applicable statute. Bouvier notes that illegal impoundment allows the owner to recover the animals directly, while legal impoundment requires payment of costs before release. This statutory-strictness principle is a useful doctrinal anchor for historical research.
Burrill's Law Dictionary focuses on the weight definition, providing the technical grounding (troy vs. avoirdupois, grain counts, and the New York statutory standard) that Black's summarizes more briefly. Burrill's entry is the most useful for researchers working with commercial or customs records.
Rapalje & Lawrence and Anderson's Dictionary of Law do not appear to contain substantive entries for pound as an independent term in the materials provided. Researchers should not rely on those sources for this term.
Historical dictionaries uniformly omit the pound de damage feasant as a named subtype, though the concept underlies the discussion of private impoundment in common law sources. Researchers will need to look beyond the dictionary shelf — to Blackstone and early property law treatises — for full treatment of that doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Modern pound law is almost entirely statutory and varies significantly by state and municipality. The right to redeem impounded animals, applicable fees, holding periods, and the process for contesting an impoundment all depend on local ordinance in addition to state statute. Historically, several New England states maintained distinct standards for the pound avoirdupois unit, which matters for pre-standardization commercial records.