Definition
A resetter is a person who receives stolen goods with knowledge that they were stolen. The term originates in Scots law, where it describes the offense of receiving — the act of knowingly accepting or concealing property that has been taken by theft. The person committing the act is the resetter; the offense itself is called reset.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who, or that which, resets.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who receives or conceals, as stolen goods or a criminal.
The modern common meaning of "resetter" has drifted entirely toward the mechanical or technological — someone who resets a device or system — and carries no criminal connotation. Webster's 1913 preserves the older legal-adjacent usage, which aligns closely with the Scots law meaning. A researcher encountering "resetter" in a modern general-purpose source will find no hint of its criminal law significance.
Common Confusion
Resetter should not be confused with the general English-law term "receiver of stolen goods" or its modern statutory successor "handling stolen property." These are functionally equivalent concepts but belong to distinct legal traditions. In English and American law, the offense developed under common law and later statute as "receiving stolen goods" or "receiving." In Scots law, the equivalent doctrine is reset, and the actor is a resetter. The concepts overlap substantially in substance — knowing receipt of stolen property — but the terminology is not interchangeable across jurisdictions, and historical sources treat them as separate doctrinal categories.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of art confined almost entirely to Scots law and to legal sources written within that tradition or commenting on it. Researchers will encounter it primarily in Scottish legal texts, comparative criminal law scholarship, and British legal dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will not appear in American case law or statutes except as an explanatory reference in comparative or historical discussion.
The key research trap is terminological: a researcher working in English common law sources who searches for the concept of knowingly receiving stolen goods will find it under "receiving" or "receiver," not "resetter." Conversely, a researcher working in Scottish legal sources who searches for "receiving stolen goods" may miss primary material organized under the reset doctrine. The two bodies of law developed parallel but distinct vocabularies for the same core wrong.
Because reset in Scots law carries its own doctrinal texture — questions about what constitutes knowledge, what property qualifies, and how the offense relates to theft and accessory liability — the term resetter is not simply a synonym for receiver of stolen goods. Treating it as such risks importing English common law assumptions into a Scots law analysis.
For corpus researchers using Law Mind, this term is a reliable marker that a source is either Scottish in origin, comparative in scope, or historically oriented toward pre-twentieth-century British legal literature. Its presence in a text can help date and situate the source.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Bouvier's are in complete agreement: resetter is defined identically across all three sources as a receiver of stolen goods in Scots law, with knowledge of the theft. There is no variation, no evolution between editions, and no additional doctrinal nuance offered by any of the three. This uniformity reflects the term's narrow, stable function — it is a term of art that does not shift meaning across the period these dictionaries cover.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide: any discussion of the offense of reset itself, the mental element required, defenses, or how Scots courts distinguished resetters from accessories to the underlying theft. Researchers seeking that doctrinal depth will need to look beyond these dictionary definitions to Scottish institutional writers such as Hume's Commentaries on the Law of Scotland Respecting Crimes or Alison's Principles and Practice of the Criminal Law of Scotland, which treat reset as a substantive offense with its own developed doctrine.
Webster's 1913 is notable for capturing both the goods-receiving and the criminal-concealing sense, suggesting the term had some broader usage in general English that extended to harboring criminals, not just receiving property. The legal dictionaries, by contrast, confine the definition to property. Researchers should be alert to this broader sense when reading non-legal historical sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Resetter is a term of Scots law. It has no recognized legal meaning in English, American, or other common law jurisdictions, where the equivalent concept is addressed under receiving stolen goods or, in modern statutes, handling or receiving stolen property. Scottish criminal law continues to recognize reset as a distinct offense, and resetter remains the operative term in that jurisdiction.