Definition
A Latin term meaning "in returning" or "while returning." Used in legal contexts to describe the return leg of a journey, particularly in cases where a person's legal status, rights, or protections during travel depend on whether they are in the act of going to a destination (eundo) or returning from it (redeundo). The term appears most often in discussions of privilege from arrest and the legal protections afforded to persons traveling to and from court, Parliament, or other official proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Redeundo functions as one part of a three-part Latin formula governing travel privilege: eundo (going), morando (remaining or staying), and redeundo (returning). Researchers encountering the term in historical sources almost certainly need all three components together to understand the doctrine being described. Finding only redeundo in an index or digest is a sign to search for the companion terms.
The practical significance in older common law was substantial. Members of Parliament, parties to litigation, witnesses, and certain officers claimed privilege from civil arrest while traveling to and from proceedings. Whether a person remained protected under that privilege on the return journey — the redeundo — was a genuine legal question. Courts drew lines around how directly and promptly a person had to travel; a detour could extinguish the privilege. Researchers working with 18th- and early 19th-century reports should expect the term to surface in privilege-from-arrest disputes rather than in any other doctrinal context.
The term has no meaningful life in modern American legal practice or statutory law. If it appears in a contemporary source, it is almost certainly a quotation from or citation to historical authority. Do not expect modern treatises to carry it.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's — provide nearly identical entries: a translation ("returning; in returning; while returning") and citations to 2 Strange 985 and, in Burrill, the additional citation to 3 East 89. The entries are thin by design; redeundo is a term of art within a larger doctrine rather than a freestanding legal concept requiring extended definition.
The citations point to English case law from the early 18th and early 19th centuries, consistent with the term's home in parliamentary and common law privilege doctrine. Neither edition of Black's expands beyond the bare translation, and Burrill adds only the second case reference. None of the historical dictionaries situates the term within the eundo/morando/redeundo triad explicitly, which is a gap researchers should note — the entry alone gives no indication that the term operates as one element of a structured privilege framework. Consulting the cited reports directly will be necessary for substantive doctrinal content.