Definition
"Wanted" carries two distinct legal meanings depending on context:
1. Statutory necessity (property and eminent domain law): When appearing in legislation authorizing condemnation or appropriation of private property — particularly in railroad and public works statutes — "wanted" means necessary or required, not merely desired or preferred. Courts have consistently read the term as a substantive threshold: the taking must be genuinely needed to accomplish the public purpose, not simply convenient or wished for.
2. Law enforcement status: A person described as "wanted" is subject to lawful arrest or detention upon identification. This status typically arises from an outstanding arrest warrant, a bench warrant, or placement on a law enforcement database or notice (such as a wanted poster or NCIC entry). Being "wanted" does not in itself establish guilt; it signals that legal process has been initiated and that authorities have authority to apprehend.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Wished for; desired; sought" — and secondarily, "subject to immediate detainment by law enforcement authorities on sight."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To want is to be without something, to lack, to need, or to desire. The 1913 sense blends deficiency (to lack) with desire (to wish for).
The gap matters in statutory interpretation. Ordinary usage treats "wanted" as roughly synonymous with "desired" or "wished for," carrying an entirely volitional flavor. In eminent domain statutes, courts have rejected that reading entirely — "wanted" imports necessity, not preference. A researcher encountering the term in a 19th-century condemnation statute must resist the natural common-language reading.
Common Confusion
The two legal meanings — statutory necessity and law enforcement status — are rarely confused with each other because context makes the distinction obvious. The more consequential confusion is within the statutory interpretation sense: readers trained on ordinary usage may import a desire-based reading into necessity-based statutory language. Bouvier flags this explicitly. The law enforcement meaning, meanwhile, is sometimes conflated with "convicted" or even "charged" — a wanted person may be neither.
Why It Matters in Research
The statutory interpretation meaning is the legally sophisticated one and the one most likely to trip up researchers working in 19th-century property, railroad, or public utilities law. When a condemnation statute authorized taking land "wanted" for a public purpose, the operative question was always whether necessity — not mere preference — had been shown. Cases interpreting this standard form a discrete line of authority in eminent domain jurisprudence.
For researchers in the Law Mind corpus, several traps arise:
First, temporal layering: 19th-century railroad statutes are the primary home of this usage. By the 20th century, legislative drafting shifted toward explicit necessity language ("necessary for," "required for"), so the "wanted" formulation becomes less common but remains interpretively live in older instruments still in effect or being construed.
Second, the law enforcement meaning dominates modern usage so thoroughly that even legally trained readers may not pause on "wanted" in a historical statutory context. The Bouvier gloss is a useful corrective but applies only to the condemnation context.
Third, jurisdictional variance in the law enforcement context: the procedural requirements for a valid warrant — and the consequences of warrantless "wanted" status — vary across federal and state systems and have been substantially shaped by Fourth Amendment doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source here and its entry is pointed and useful. Bouvier draws directly on case law — citing Kentucky and Connecticut authorities — to establish that "wanted" in condemnation statutes means "necessary," not "desired." This is a classic example of judicial construction overriding ordinary meaning to impose a higher legal standard, and Bouvier captures the distinction crisply.
What Bouvier does not address is the law enforcement meaning, which by the late 19th century was already in common circulation (wanted posters, fugitive notices). That omission reflects Bouvier's orientation toward private law and civil procedure rather than criminal process. Researchers should not read the silence as suggesting the law enforcement usage lacked legal content — it simply fell outside Bouvier's scope.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind shelf treats "wanted" as a discrete legal term. The statutory interpretation gloss is effectively Bouvier's contribution; the law enforcement meaning is better traced through criminal procedure treatises and constitutional doctrine than through general legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The statutory necessity reading was developed primarily in state court decisions interpreting state railroad and condemnation statutes. Federal condemnation practice tracks similar necessity requirements, but the specific interpretive history is state-by-state. The law enforcement meaning implicates Fourth Amendment warrant requirements uniformly at the federal constitutional floor, with states free to impose stricter procedural protections.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Eminent Domain (for the statutory necessity meaning and condemnation framework)
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Search and Seizure (for the warrant and law enforcement detention context)