Definition
Latin. "Wherefore"; "for what reason"; "on what account." In law, quare functions primarily as a formal introductory word in classical common-law writs and pleadings, signaling a demand to know the cause or reason for some act or omission. The word does not stand alone as a legal concept but operates as the operative Latin term from which a family of writ names derives — most notably writs sounding in trespass and related actions.
As a writ prefix: Quare appears in the titles of numerous old English writs — such as quare impedit, quare ejecit infra terminum, and quare clausum fregit — in each case introducing the operative question the writ poses to the defendant or a Crown official. In writs addressed to local officers (such as a mayor commanded to deliver seisin of land to the king's grantee), quare introduced the command to show cause why the officer had delayed performance of his duty.
As a term of pleading: In Latin pleading forms, quare introduced the plaintiff's statement of grievance. The phrase quare vi et armis ("wherefore by force and arms") was a standard formula in trespass declarations.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Queer, strange" (dialectal or archaic English); also "a lot of, very, great" (regional usage).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not treated as an English word in standard 19th-century lexicons; the term was recognized as a Latin borrowing in legal contexts.
The gap here is near-total. In any surviving ordinary English usage, quare means something like "odd" or "peculiar" — a meaning that has no connection to its legal function. Researchers encountering quare in legal documents should treat it as Latin, not English, and as a structural word marking either a writ name or a pleading formula rather than a substantive legal concept in its own right.
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Why It Matters in Research
Quare matters to researchers primarily as a navigational key for identifying writ families in historical sources. When encountered in the title of an old writ or action, it signals a show-cause structure: someone is being required to explain why they acted (or failed to act). Recognizing this structure allows a researcher to:
Identify writ type: A writ beginning with quare is almost always a species of trespass, an obstruction action, or a duty-enforcement writ. This narrows the procedural posture immediately.
Trace writ families: The quare writs form a loosely related corpus documented in the Registrum Brevium (Register of Writs) and Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium. Burrill's reference to the Reg. Orig. at pages 93–112 points to the density of quare writs in that source. Researchers working in medieval or early modern English legal records will encounter clusters of these forms.
Distinguish pleading formulas from writ names: In some sources, quare introduces a pleading clause (quare vi et armis); in others it is part of the writ's formal title (quare impedit). These are related but distinct uses, and conflating them can obscure what stage of a proceeding a source is describing.
Latin pleading obsolescence: Because Latin pleading was abolished in England in 1733 (and earlier in various forms), sources before and after that date use the term differently. Post-abolition references to quare are almost exclusively historical, archival, or taxonomic.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on two points: quare means "wherefore" or "for what reason," and it functions as a formal word in writs, especially trespass. Black's (both editions) and Burrill agree on this core meaning. Burrill's entry is the most precise in pointing to primary sources, directing researchers to the Register of Writs and to Fleta, a 13th-century treatise that catalogs early writ forms.
Black's entries add the specific application to writs commanding local officers to explain delays in performing Crown-ordered duties — a narrower but historically important use. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is unhelpfully diffuse, running quare into a general section note and then pivoting immediately to quanti minoris, suggesting the editors treated quare as too elementary to warrant independent treatment.
Anderson's simply cross-references the letter Q, offering no substantive guidance — a common limitation of that dictionary for Latin terms.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: none of them maps the full family of quare writs or explains how the term functions structurally across different writ types. A researcher relying solely on these entries will understand the word but may not recognize how to use it to locate or classify primary materials.
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Jurisdictional Note
Quare as a live procedural term is historical; no American or modern English jurisdiction employs Latin writ forms in practice. Residual relevance arises in Louisiana, where civil law influence produced distinct procedural forms — note Rapalje & Lawrence's reference to the quanti minoris action in Louisiana — but quare itself has no special Louisiana significance.
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