Definition
Procuring goods to be taken in execution refers to the act of arranging, inducing, or bringing about the seizure of another person's goods under a writ of execution. The phrase describes conduct by which a party — typically a judgment creditor or an agent acting on their behalf — causes the legal machinery of execution to operate against specific property. In historical English and American practice, execution was the process by which a court officer (a sheriff or marshal) levied upon and seized a judgment debtor's goods in satisfaction of a money judgment.
The phrase appears most often in the context of determining liability: whether a person who procured the taking — rather than the officer who physically seized the goods — could be held responsible for an improper or unlawful execution. A creditor who directed or procured an execution against goods not subject to levy, or against goods belonging to a third party, could face an action in trespass or for wrongful execution.
Common Confusion
This phrase should not be confused with the general concept of execution or levy, which describe the formal legal process itself. "Procuring" goods to be taken focuses specifically on the instigation or direction of that process by a private party — the judgment creditor or their attorney — as distinct from the court officer's act of physical seizure. The distinction matters for liability: the officer who executes a facially valid writ may be protected; the party who procured an unlawful levy may not be.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a term of art from English and early American common law procedure and will appear almost exclusively in older case reports, pleading manuals, and treatises on execution practice. Researchers should be alert to its procedural context: the question of who "procured" the taking was critical for assigning tortious liability when an execution was challenged as wrongful. A sheriff acting on a creditor's instructions occupied a different legal position than one acting on the face of a valid writ alone, and the creditor who procured the levy could be joined as a defendant or held primarily liable.
The truncated Rapalje & Lawrence entry — citing 1 Car. & M. 458 — points to Carrington & Marshman's English Nisi Prius Reports, a mid-nineteenth-century English reporter. Researchers working with this citation should locate that volume in collections of English common law reporters; the case likely addressed the boundaries of a creditor's liability for directing a levy. Because the Rapalje & Lawrence entry itself is fragmentary (the headword appears cut off as "TION"), the full entry in the original dictionary may contain additional analysis that did not survive transcription.
For corpus researchers, this term signals pleading-era execution doctrine. Search companion terms — levy, fieri facias, wrongful execution, trespass de bonis asportatis — to reconstruct the full doctrinal picture. The concept has largely been absorbed into modern judgment enforcement and sheriff's liability law, where it appears in different vocabulary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence offer only a fragment: the headword appears to be a continuation of a longer entry (the surviving text begins "TION"), with a single citation to 1 Car. & M. 458. This strongly suggests the entry originally addressed what conduct does or does not constitute "procuring" goods to be taken in execution — likely distinguishing between a creditor who merely holds a writ and one who affirmatively directs or identifies property for seizure. The distinction was legally consequential: passive possession of a writ generally insulated a creditor from trespass liability, while active procurement did not.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus presently supplies a fuller treatment. The absence of coverage in later American dictionaries (such as Bouvier or Black) reflects the absorption of this specific phrase into broader doctrines of execution liability and sheriff's indemnification, rather than any indication that the concept lost practical importance during the nineteenth century.