Definition
Prisel en auter liev (Law French: "a taking in another place") is a plea in abatement available in replevin actions. The defendant invokes it to challenge the plaintiff's description of where the goods or chattels were taken, asserting that the alleged taking occurred at a different location than the one identified in the plaintiff's declaration. The plea does not dispute that a taking occurred, nor that the plaintiff may have a right to the property — it targets only the geographic particulars of the claim as pleaded.
Because it is a plea in abatement rather than a plea in bar, a successful prisel en auter liev does not defeat the plaintiff's underlying right of action. It defeats only the current proceeding on technical grounds, leaving the plaintiff free to recommence with a corrected description of the location.
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Common Confusion
Prisel en auter liev is sometimes loosely grouped with pleas in bar, but the distinction is consequential. A plea in bar extinguishes the right of action entirely. A plea in abatement — which prisel en auter liev is — merely defeats the present suit on a defect of form or circumstance, leaving the plaintiff's substantive claim intact. Researchers encountering this plea in historical replevin records should be careful not to interpret a successful outcome for the defendant as a final resolution of the underlying property dispute.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a narrow and largely obsolete corner of common law pleading. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century English case law and in early American common law materials that tracked English replevin practice closely.
The term appears in the context of common law replevin, a writ action with elaborate formal pleading requirements. The precise description of where property was taken — the vill, manor, or county — was a substantive pleading element, not mere background detail. Errors in that description were exploitable by defendants, and prisel en auter liev was the formal mechanism for doing so. Understanding this helps researchers interpret why a replevin action might fail on what appears to be a technicality unrelated to the merits.
The phrase itself is Law French, the archaic Anglo-Norman legal dialect used in English courts well into the seventeenth century. Researchers working in early modern English legal records should be alert to variant spellings and abbreviations — Law French was never standardized, and scribal and print variations are common. The term may appear as "prise en auter lieu," "prisel en auter lieu," or in Anglicized paraphrases.
The single citation in Black's — 2 Ld. Raym. 1016, 1017 — refers to Lord Raymond's Reports, a reliable source for late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English common law. Researchers should consult that report directly for the procedural context in which the plea was actually argued.
This term has no meaningful presence in modern American or English practice. Replevin has been substantially reformed and, in most jurisdictions, absorbed into general civil procedure. The formal plea in abatement as a distinct pleading device has likewise been eliminated or restructured by procedural codes. The term is now of historical and scholarly interest only.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. The definition is sparse but accurate: it correctly identifies the term as Law French, translates it, categorizes it as a plea in abatement, and grounds it in the replevin context with a citation to Lord Raymond.
What Black's does not provide — and what researchers should supply from secondary sources — is any account of the pleading mechanics: how the plea was raised, what it required the defendant to allege, how the plaintiff might respond, and under what circumstances courts allowed amendment. For that, treatises on common law pleading (Gould, Stephen, or Chitty on pleading) are the appropriate next step. Blackstone's Commentaries touch on replevin procedure in volume three, and the replevin entries in older English legal dictionaries (Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's New Law Dictionary) may provide additional context.
No modern legal dictionary of consequence carries this term as an active entry, which is itself informative: the term is effectively extinct as operative legal vocabulary.
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Jurisdictional Note
Prisel en auter liev was an English common law plea. Early American courts applying common law replevin procedure would have recognized it, but adoption was uneven across the states. With the widespread enactment of civil procedure codes beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the formal plea structure that gave rise to this term was abolished in most American jurisdictions.
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