Definition
PRODUCE carries two distinct legal meanings that operate in entirely separate contexts:
1. (verb) To bring forward, exhibit, or make available for inspection — particularly documents, records, or tangible items in the context of litigation, discovery, or regulatory compliance. A party who receives a subpoena duces tecum or a discovery demand is required to produce the specified materials. The act of producing constitutes formal compliance with a legal demand and typically creates obligations around authenticity, completeness, and privilege review.
2. (noun) The output, yield, or product of natural growth, labor, or capital — most commonly agricultural products, crops, or raw goods derived from land. This noun sense appears frequently in agricultural law, landlord-tenant disputes, landlord's lien statutes, and commercial law governing the sale of farm goods.
The verb and noun senses are unrelated in legal usage and are rarely confused in context, but a researcher encountering the term without surrounding context should determine which sense is operative before proceeding.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To bring forth, yield, make, manufacture, or otherwise generate; to make something available to a person or authority for inspection; to sponsor and present a motion picture or performance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To bring forward; to lead forth; to offer to view or notice; to exhibit; to show; as, to produce a witness or evidence in court; also, to bring forth as young or as a natural product or growth; to give birth to; to bear; to generate.
The common English meanings overlap substantially with both legal senses, so the gap here is one of precision rather than reversal. In law, the verb sense is narrower and procedurally loaded — producing documents in discovery is not merely showing them informally but constitutes a defined act within a regulated process carrying consequences for failure or incomplete compliance. The noun sense, meanwhile, is typically limited in legal contexts to goods of natural origin and does not extend to manufactured products, a restriction the common usage does not impose.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Produce (noun — agricultural):
- Farm produce: The yield of cultivated land, generally confined to annual crops gathered from the soil. Historical authority holds that beef raised and slaughtered on a farm is not "produce of a farm" in the legal sense, and "yearly produce" is further limited to crops gathered annually.
- Natural produce: Output arising from the land without significant human processing, distinguishable from manufactured or processed goods for purposes of liens, leases, and commodity statutes.
Produce (verb — discovery/litigation):
- Production of documents: The core discovery obligation to make records, electronically stored information, or tangible things available for inspection and copying by the opposing party or a tribunal.
- Production in response to subpoena: Compelled disclosure to a court or agency, typically via subpoena duces tecum. Failure to produce when properly commanded may constitute contempt.
- Voluntary production: Disclosure made without compulsion, which may affect waiver analysis in privilege disputes.
Why It Matters in Research
The verb sense dominates procedural and discovery materials across the corpus. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century sources should note that formal discovery as a regularized pretrial mechanism did not exist in its modern form — references to production in older cases typically arise at trial (producing documents before the court or jury) rather than through the structured pretrial exchange that modern practitioners assume. The shift to pretrial discovery under the Federal Rules framework in 1938 changed both the timing and the stakes of production obligations. A historical source discussing failure to produce may be addressing a trial-stage matter, not a discovery sanction.
For the noun sense, researchers should exercise caution with agricultural statutes and lease instruments. Courts have historically read "produce" narrowly when it appears in lien statutes or crop-sharing agreements — beef, timber, and dairy have at various times been held outside the term's scope in specific jurisdictions. The Bouvier entries and early state court decisions are useful anchors here, but researchers should not assume uniformity across states or time periods.
Corpus connection: When researching production obligations in litigation, the subpoena duces tecum entry is an essential companion. When researching the noun sense in agricultural or landlord contexts, cross-reference lien law, crop law, and tenancy-related entries. The two senses rarely appear together, but a statute or instrument using the term without definition should be read in light of the full surrounding context before a meaning is assumed.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries split cleanly between the two senses. Black's (both editions) and Anderson's treat produce exclusively as a verb meaning to bring forward or exhibit, with the trial context foregrounded. The subpoena duces tecum is the paradigmatic example in both Black's editions, reflecting the litigation-centric focus of those works.
Bouvier stands apart by treating produce as a noun — the product of natural growth, labor, or capital — and supplies the only historical authority in this set that engages with the agricultural meaning directly. Bouvier's citation to specific state decisions (limiting farm produce to annual crops, excluding beef) is the most granular guidance available in the historical shelf for the noun sense, and researchers relying on it should note that those cases are narrow and jurisdiction-specific.
Anderson's entry is fragmentary as excerpted but gestures toward the adversarial notice requirement in trial-stage document production, which aligns with the procedural posture described in both Black's editions.
None of the historical dictionaries address electronically stored information, privilege logs, or the pretrial discovery obligations that now dominate the verb sense in practice. These are entirely modern accretions not visible in the historical record.
Jurisdictional Note
The noun sense of produce varies by jurisdiction in agricultural lien and landlord contexts — what qualifies as "produce" for purposes of a landlord's lien on crops, for instance, has been interpreted differently across state courts and may turn on state statutory definition. The verb sense is broadly uniform in federal practice under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure but may vary in state courts following their own procedural codes.