Definition
Requisites (plural of requisite) are the necessary conditions, qualifications, or elements that must be present for a legal right, claim, remedy, or transaction to be valid or enforceable. In legal usage, the term refers to the threshold requirements that a party must satisfy before a court will recognize or enforce a particular legal position. Where a statute, doctrine, or common law rule is said to have "requisites," those requisites function as a checklist: all must be met, and the failure of any one is ordinarily fatal to the claim or right at issue.
The term appears most prominently in older legal literature in connection with liens, contracts, and procedural requirements, where writers would enumerate the "requisites" of a valid lien, a binding agreement, or a proper pleading rather than use the modern vocabulary of "elements" or "requirements."
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of requisite; things that are necessary or required.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Things necessary for some purpose; that which is indispensably necessary.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is narrow but precise. In ordinary English, "requisites" suggests practical necessities — what you need to bring on a camping trip. In legal usage, the term carries a harder edge: these are not merely useful or advisable conditions but formal threshold requirements whose absence defeats a legal right entirely. Where common usage allows for degrees ("mostly requisite"), legal usage treats each requisite as binary — satisfied or not.
Common Confusion
Requisites vs. Elements: Modern legal drafting and judicial opinions tend to prefer "elements" when describing the components of a cause of action or crime, and "requirements" in statutory contexts. "Requisites" is the older term and appears predominantly in treatises and dictionaries predating the twentieth century. Researchers encountering "requisites" in historical sources should treat the term as functionally equivalent to "elements" or "requirements" in modern usage, without assuming any substantive difference in meaning.
Requisites vs. Conditions: "Conditions" in legal usage often implies a contingency — something that may or may not occur and whose occurrence triggers or defeats a right. "Requisites" are antecedent necessities, not contingencies. A condition can be waived or excused in some doctrinal frameworks; a requisite, as used in classical legal literature, is more typically treated as an indispensable threshold.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter "requisites" primarily as an organizational term in older treatises and digest literature, where authors structured doctrinal exposition by listing the requisites of a particular legal institution before analyzing its consequences. Bouvier's, for example, uses the term to enumerate what a claimant must establish to assert a lien — delivery, possession, and the nature of the claim — before analyzing how those requirements interact.
The practical research trap is anachronism in both directions. Reading backwards into older sources: modern researchers accustomed to the word "elements" may skim past "requisites" language without recognizing that the author is doing the same structural work as a modern elements analysis. Reading forwards into modern sources: a researcher starting from an older treatise that lists "requisites" must verify whether the courts and legislatures in the relevant jurisdiction have reformulated those requirements, added to them, or abandoned some entirely.
The Bouvier's excerpt illustrates a narrower use case: the requisites of a tradesman's lien. Delivery into possession is identified as one requisite; the excerpt then distinguishes scenarios where authority comes from the owner versus from a third party, which affects whether a general lien attaches. This structural move — listing requisites, then parsing edge cases — is common in nineteenth-century legal writing and signals that a fuller doctrinal treatment follows in the surrounding text.
When researching any topic in sources that use "requisites" as an organizing concept, treat the list of requisites as the entry point to the doctrine, not the whole of it. The cases and qualifications that follow are typically where the substantive legal content lives.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary uses "requisites" in a technically precise way, treating it as the formal vocabulary for the conditions precedent to a legal right. The excerpt concerning liens identifies delivery of property into possession as one requisite of a valid lien claim — a position consistent with the general common law rule. Bouvier's then immediately introduces a limitation: where delivery is made by a third party acting under the owner's authority, a general lien for a running balance may not attach against the owner. This is not a contradiction of the requisite but a parsing of its scope.
What historical dictionaries including Bouvier's do not do is systematically distinguish "requisites" from "elements," "essentials," or "conditions precedent." These terms are used interchangeably across the nineteenth-century treatise literature, and Bouvier's is no exception. Researchers should not infer doctrinal significance from the choice among these synonyms in historical sources.