Definition
Money transmitted from one person to another, whether in specie (coin or currency), bill of exchange, check, draft, or other instrument. The term refers both to the act of transmitting the funds and to the sum or instrument itself.
In commercial law, remittance typically arises between merchants or trading parties at a distance, serving as the mechanism by which payment obligations are discharged across geographic separation. It is not limited to a single payment form; any instrument that conveys monetary value satisfies the definition.
In a secondary procedural sense found in older equity and common law practice, "remittance" (or "remittitur") refers to a court's formal relinquishment or waiver of a portion of damages or of a procedural requirement — though this usage is more precisely captured under REMITTITUR and should be distinguished from the commercial meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of sending money to someone; money sent to another person, typically in another country; money sent by a foreign worker back to their home country.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of transmitting money, bills, or the like, especially to a distant place, in satisfaction of a demand or discharge of an obligation; also, the sum or thing remitted.
The common and legal meanings track closely, but there is a practical gap worth noting for researchers: modern common usage has narrowed "remittance" toward international transfers by migrant workers, giving it an almost exclusively cross-border and personal connotation. The legal definition is broader and older — it encompasses any transmission of funds between any parties, commercial or private, domestic or foreign. A researcher encountering "remittance" in a nineteenth-century commercial law context should not assume an international or labor-migration dimension; the term simply meant payment forwarded by any means.
Common Confusion
REMITTANCE vs. REMITTITUR: These terms share a Latin root and appear in close proximity in older legal dictionaries, creating genuine confusion. Remittance is a commercial-law term meaning money transmitted in payment. Remittitur is a procedural-law term with two distinct meanings: (1) a trial court's order reducing an excessive jury verdict, conditioned on the plaintiff's consent; and (2) in appellate practice, the formal certificate by which a higher court returns jurisdiction to the lower court. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry for remittance inadvertently bleeds into remittitur territory by appending language about replevin judgments and remitting trifling damages — a textual artifact that underscores the conflation risk in historical sources. Keep the two terms strictly separate in research.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research risk with remittance is the bleed between commercial and procedural usage in historical dictionaries, illustrated directly by the Rapalje & Lawrence entry, which splices remittance language together with what is clearly a remittitur discussion. Researchers working in older digests or case reporters should verify which sense is operative before relying on an index entry.
In commercial law archives, remittance appears frequently in bills of exchange litigation, agency disputes, and factor-principal correspondence. Its meaning is stable across the nineteenth century, but the instruments that constitute a remittance evolved: specie remittance gave way to draft and check remittance as banking infrastructure developed, and modern contexts add wire transfers, ACH payments, and digital transfers that historical definitions do not name but would encompass under their "or otherwise" catch-all language.
For researchers working in immigration law, labor law, or international development contexts, the modern narrowing of "remittance" to mean specifically migrant worker transfers back to home countries creates a terminological split. Statutory and regulatory materials from the late twentieth century onward — particularly under consumer financial protection frameworks governing international money transfers — use "remittance" in this narrower sense. Pre-twentieth-century commercial sources do not.
Bouvier's limiting qualifier "In Commercial Law" is a useful signal: it acknowledges that remittance belongs to the law merchant tradition and should be read against the backdrop of mercantile custom rather than general property or tort doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on a nearly identical core definition: money sent from one person to another by any instrument. The agreement is unusual in its uniformity and reflects how settled this term was in the commercial law vocabulary by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Black's first and second editions are verbatim identical. Bouvier adds the "In Commercial Law" classifier and substitutes "merchant" for "person," which is a meaningful precision — Bouvier situates remittance squarely within the law merchant tradition rather than treating it as a general legal concept.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the outlier. The entry begins with the standard definition but then appends material about replevin judgments and the remission of trifling damages — almost certainly a typographical or editorial error in the original that merged two adjacent entries. This is a genuine trap for researchers consulting that source. The appended material belongs to remittitur or remission, not remittance.
None of the historical dictionaries address the procedural modernization of remittance instruments, the rise of international wire transfer, or the regulatory overlay that governs remittance transfers today. For anything after the early twentieth century, historical dictionary definitions provide only a baseline and must be supplemented with statutory and regulatory sources.
Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, international remittance transfers are now regulated at the federal level under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act as amended by the Dodd-Frank Act, with implementing regulations issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This regulatory layer imposes disclosure and error-resolution requirements that have no counterpart in historical commercial law. Researchers moving between nineteenth-century mercantile sources and modern consumer finance materials should treat these as distinct legal regimes sharing a common vocabulary.