Definition
REMIT carries three distinct legal meanings that operate in separate contexts. Researchers must identify which sense is operative before interpreting any source.
1. To transmit money or payment. In commercial and transactional contexts, to remit is to send funds — typically to discharge a debt or obligation at a distance. This is the broadest and most frequently encountered modern usage.
2. To send back; to refer to a lower tribunal. In appellate and procedural contexts, to remit is to return a matter to a lower court or body for further proceedings consistent with the higher court's ruling. This sense is functionally equivalent to remand in American usage, though the two terms carry distinct technical histories. British and Commonwealth jurisdictions lean more heavily on remit in this procedural sense.
3. To relinquish, annul, or pardon. In penalty and forfeiture contexts, to remit is to release a fine, discharge a debt, forgive an offense, or waive a legal claim. Courts exercising discretionary authority may remit a forfeiture or fine where circumstances — illness, excusable neglect, equitable considerations — warrant relief.
Noun form: In modern usage, remit (noun) denotes the scope of authority or set of responsibilities assigned to a person, body, or tribunal. A court acting "within its remit" is acting within its defined jurisdiction or mandate. This noun sense is more common in British and Commonwealth legal writing than in American practice.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Terms of reference; set of responsibilities; scope" and "A communication from a superior court to a subordinate court."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To send back; to give up; to surrender; to resign" and "To transmit or send, especially to a distance, as money in payment."
The gap between common and legal usage here runs in both directions. The ordinary meaning of remit as "to send money" aligns cleanly with legal sense 1, and Webster's captures the forgiveness and sending-back senses that map onto legal senses 2 and 3. The divergence emerges in the noun form: the modern lay use of remit to mean "scope of responsibility" (as in "that's outside my remit") is an administrative and organizational usage that has crossed into legal drafting, particularly in statutory and regulatory instruments, where it defines the mandate of a body or official. Researchers should not assume this noun sense carries technical procedural weight — it is largely descriptive, not operative.
Common Confusion
REMIT and REMAND are frequently used interchangeably in appellate contexts, but they are not synonyms in American federal practice. Remand is the dominant American term for an appellate court's direction returning a case to a lower court. Remit, in the sense of sending back, appears more often in British, Commonwealth, and older American sources. Conflating them in historical research can create false impressions about which court holds a matter or what action has been directed. See also REMITTITUR, which derives from the verb but names a specific procedural device — the court-ordered reduction of an excessive damages award — and should not be used interchangeably with remit in the annulment sense.
Why It Matters in Research
The three-sense structure of remit creates real traps in corpus research. A keyword search for "remit" in historical sources will return results spanning commercial payment, appellate procedure, and penalty forgiveness — three substantively unrelated legal events. The word itself provides no signal about which sense applies; context is everything.
In older American and English reporters, remit in the procedural sense (send back) appears where modern American courts would write remand. A 19th-century opinion stating the court "remitted the cause" is directing return to a lower tribunal, not forgiving a penalty or transmitting funds. This distinction matters when tracking appellate outcomes in historical cases.
The penalty-forgiveness sense appears most often in tax, forfeiture, customs, and admiralty sources, as well as in early equity materials. Courts exercising discretionary jurisdiction over fines routinely speak of remitting penalties, and this usage persists in modern regulatory contexts (remission of penalty, remission of forfeiture).
The noun form remit — meaning mandate or scope — is prevalent in British statutory drafting and in documents governing administrative bodies, commissions, and tribunals. It appears frequently in Law Commission reports, public inquiries, and regulatory frameworks. American researchers encountering this usage in Commonwealth materials should not read it as a procedural direction.
Connections within a Law Mind corpus: entries touching remittitur, remand, forfeiture, and appellate procedure will cluster around overlapping uses of this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on two core meanings — transmit and relinquish — with some extending to the send-back sense. Black's first edition gives only the commercial transmission meaning. The second edition adds the relinquishment sense explicitly, noting the annulment of fines. Burrill tracks closely with Black's, grounding both the transmission and relinquishment meanings in the Latin remittere.
Anderson's is the most practically useful of the historical sources here: it enumerates the send-back sense (return of a record to an inferior court), the release sense (discharge of debt, penalty, offense), and connects the verb to remittitur — the procedural device for reducing excessive damages. This connection between remit and remittitur is important and underweighted by the other dictionaries.
Bouvier focuses almost entirely on the penalty-forgiveness sense, using the example of a juror fined for non-attendance whose fine is remitted on a showing of illness. This illustrates the discretionary and equitable character of remittance in the forfeiture context.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry, as reproduced, addresses a sittings-related procedural note rather than the term directly — an artifact of how the entry was captured — and contributes little independent definitional weight here.
None of the historical dictionaries address the modern noun sense of remit as scope or mandate. This usage postdates the core compilation period of these sources and reflects 20th-century administrative and statutory drafting conventions. Researchers should not expect historical dictionary support for this sense.
Jurisdictional Note
American practice strongly favors remand over remit in appellate procedure; remit in the send-back sense is largely obsolete in American federal courts but survives in some state courts and in the historical record. British and Commonwealth jurisdictions retain remit as the standard term for directing a matter back to a lower tribunal or decision-maker. The noun sense of remit as scope of authority is embedded in Commonwealth statutory drafting and is far less common in American legal instruments.