Definition
In legal usage, "start" means the commencement or initiation of an action, enterprise, or undertaking. The term is not confined to its intuitive sense of physical departure — setting out on a journey or beginning a race — but extends to the commencement of any enterprise, plan, or course of conduct. Courts and legal writers have applied the word broadly: a debtor who "starts to leave the State" has commenced a course of action relevant to insolvency law even before physically departing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To begin, commence, or initiate; to set something in motion; to ready a vehicle or machine for operation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To set out; to move suddenly from surprise or emotion; to commence a course of action or journey.
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but consequential. Ordinary usage anchors "start" to a moment of physical motion or obvious initiation. Legal usage deliberately decouples the word from physical departure, treating the commencement of an intent or enterprise — even before any overt act — as sufficient. This distinction mattered most in insolvency and fraudulent conveyance contexts, where courts had to determine when a debtor's scheme "started" for purposes of establishing a fraudulent intent.
Common Confusion
"Start" should not be confused with "departure," though both terms describe the beginning of movement or action. "Departure" in legal usage carries a more specific freight — often tied to the physical act of leaving a jurisdiction or deviating from a prior course of conduct. "Start" is the broader term: a debtor may "start" to leave a state (commencing the enterprise of flight) without yet having "departed." Anderson's explicitly cross-references DEPARTURE, signaling that courts distinguished the two in insolvency contexts. Researchers working in fraudulent conveyance or absconding-debtor materials should treat these as related but non-synonymous terms.
Why It Matters in Research
This entry is a narrow but useful navigational signal. The legal dictionaries flag "start" precisely because courts had to resist the common-sense instinct to read the word as requiring physical motion. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century insolvency cases, whether a debtor had "started" to leave the state could determine whether a creditor could invoke attachment or other pre-judgment remedies. The commencement of the intent and enterprise — not the first physical step — was the operative moment.
Researchers in the Law Mind corpus should note:
First, when encountering "start" in older insolvency, fraudulent transfer, or attachment materials, do not assume the word requires completed physical departure. Courts read it expansively.
Second, the term appears in factual recitations and jury instructions more often than in formal doctrinal holdings. It is a word of fact-description that carries legal weight in context.
Third, the citation in Bouvier (54 Ia. 721) anchors this expansive reading in Iowa case law, suggesting the interpretive question arose in creditor-remedy litigation in Midwestern jurisdictions. Researchers tracing this issue should look to state attachment statutes and their judicial construction.
Fourth, "start" is unlikely to generate useful results as a standalone search term in most legal databases — it is too common a word. Its legal significance emerges only in context, particularly alongside terms like "leave the state," "insolvent," "creditor," or "depart."
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's and Bouvier's are in agreement on the core point: "start" is not limited to physical departure. Both frame the definition against the intuitive understanding of the word (setting out on a journey or race) and then expand it to cover the commencement of any enterprise or undertaking. Anderson's adds the concrete example of an insolvent creditor "starting to leave the State," which grounds the abstract point in a specific legal context.
Neither dictionary is comprehensive on the term. Both entries are brief and citation-light — Bouvier offers a single Iowa citation; Anderson's offers none of its own. This suggests "start" was not a heavily contested term of art but rather a word whose legal meaning was clarified in passing, in the course of resolving insolvency disputes. Researchers should not expect a deep doctrinal literature on the word itself; its significance is contextual rather than definitional.
Jurisdictional Note
The expansive reading of "start" in insolvency contexts appears most clearly in Iowa case law, as reflected in Bouvier's citation. Whether other jurisdictions adopted identical readings in their attachment and fraudulent transfer statutes would require jurisdiction-specific research. Modern usage of the term in statutory texts is generally governed by ordinary meaning unless a statute or case law establishes otherwise.