Definition
To reclaim, in law, is to demand back something previously parted with — typically a payment, consideration, or property — on the grounds that the other party has failed to perform an obligation or that the original transfer was conditional, mistaken, or obtained improperly. The term carries two principal legal senses:
1. Recovery of consideration or property. A party who has conferred a benefit — money paid, goods delivered, land transferred — may reclaim that benefit when the counterparty fails to perform the agreed obligation, or when the transfer was induced by fraud or false pretenses. The action may sound in contract (covenant or assumpsit) or in property, depending on what is being recovered and why.
2. Feudal reclamation. In feudal law, a lord's act of pursuing and recalling a vassal who had departed to reside elsewhere without leave. This usage is archaic and appears only in historical sources.
A secondary legal meaning, preserved in Anderson's, covers the domestication or taming of wild animals and the cultivation or improvement of waste or wild land — bringing something unruly or unproductive into lawful productive use.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To return land to a usable condition; to obtain useful products from waste; to claim something back or repossess it; to reform a person; to tame a wild animal.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To claim back; to demand the return of as a right; to attempt to recover possession of.
The common and legal senses overlap substantially, but the legal usage is narrower and more precise. In ordinary English, "reclaim" comfortably covers environmental restoration, recycling, and moral reform. In law, the term is almost always tethered to a prior transaction: something was given, a condition failed or an obligation was breached, and the party who gave it now demands it back. The environmental and moral senses of the word carry no legal weight in most contexts.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Reclaim of consideration: The most frequent legal usage. When a plaintiff has paid money or delivered property under a contract and the defendant fails to perform, the plaintiff may reclaim the consideration through an action in assumpsit or covenant.
Reclaim of property obtained by fraud: A party who was induced to part with property by false pretenses retains the right to reclaim it; title does not pass cleanly through fraud.
Reclamation of wild land: The conversion of waste, swamp, or uncultivated land into productive use, giving rise to questions of ownership, improvement rights, and public land grants. Distinct from the contractual sense.
Reclamation of wild animals: The legal domestication or taming of a ferae naturae animal, which can affect property rights in the animal. Historically treated as its own subject in early legal dictionaries.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "reclaim" and its noun form "reclamation" in substantially different legal contexts, and conflating them causes misdirection. In contract and commercial law sources, the operative question is always whether a prior transfer was conditional and whether a triggering failure has occurred. In property and public lands sources, "reclamation" shifts entirely to land improvement and water rights — federal reclamation statutes (particularly the Reclamation Act of 1902) use the term in the land-improvement sense, with no connection to contract recovery.
In historical corpus sources, "reclaim" in early pleading and equity materials is a functional synonym for what modern law calls restitution or unjust enrichment recovery. Researchers tracing the doctrinal lineage of restitution should look for "reclaim" as a period-accurate alternative to those modern terms. The Bouvier citation to 1 Caines 47 reflects early American assumpsit practice and illustrates how the reclamation of consideration was handled procedurally before modern restitution doctrine consolidated these claims.
The feudal sense of reclaim — a lord's right to recall a departing vassal — will appear in Black's and other dictionaries but has no living legal application. Treat it as a glossary note for reading medieval and early modern English legal materials only.
Jurisdictional variation matters most in the land-reclamation sense. Western states with federal reclamation projects, riparian rights, and public land regimes will have extensive statutory and case law on "reclamation" that is entirely inapplicable to an eastern commercial dispute about recovering a payment.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources agree on the core contractual sense: reclaim is the act of demanding back a consideration when the other side has not performed. Bouvier states this most precisely, tying the right to an action in assumpsit and citing specific authority. Rapalje & Lawrence echoes the same rule in compressed form. Black's (1st ed.) leads with the general demand-back formulation and adds the fraud variant (goods obtained under false pretenses), which usefully extends the concept beyond simple contract failure. Anderson's is the most expansive, offering both the consideration-recovery sense and the land/animal domestication sense as coordinate definitions — a useful reminder that the word carried multiple independent legal meanings simultaneously in nineteenth-century practice.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is connect "reclaim" to what became the law of restitution and unjust enrichment. They treat it procedurally and transactionally. Modern researchers should not expect historical entries to frame the concept in terms of benefit-at-the-expense-of-another or disgorgement; those theoretical structures came later. The historical sources describe when and how you could get your money or goods back; the theory behind the right is largely implicit.
Black's 2nd edition's entry fragment is less useful for the RECLAIM definition itself, as the extracted text is partially displaced by surrounding material; the core definition mirrors the 1st edition.
Jurisdictional Note
The contractual reclaim sense is broadly consistent across common law jurisdictions, though the procedural vehicle (assumpsit, restitution, unjust enrichment claim) will vary by era and jurisdiction. The land-reclamation sense diverges sharply: western United States jurisdictions have extensive federal and state statutory frameworks governing reclamation projects, water allocation, and public land improvement that have no counterpart in eastern states or non-U.S. common law systems.