Definition
A term of art in common law pleading used to allege that a defendant acted with a malicious or improper motive in committing the act complained of. It does not describe the act itself but characterizes the defendant's mental state at the time of the act — specifically, that the defendant harbored an unlawful or wrongful intent directed at the plaintiff or plaintiff's interests. The phrase typically appears in the charging portion of a declaration or complaint, preceding a description of the injurious act, to signal that the cause of action carries a fault element beyond mere negligence.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry exists. The phrase is not in general circulation as an ordinary English expression.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Neither "wrongfully" nor "intending" in combination appears as a defined compound. Separately, "wrongfully" means in a wrong manner; unjustly. "Intending" means proposing; purposing.
The ordinary sense of the two words combined is simply what it sounds like — meaning to do something with a bad purpose. The legal significance is narrower and more technical: in pleading, "wrongfully intending" was a formulaic phrase with recognized legal force, not mere description. Its presence in a declaration signaled a specific allegation of malicious motive that courts expected in particular forms of action, and its omission could be a ground for demurrer.
---
Common Confusion
"Wrongfully intending" is sometimes treated as interchangeable with mens rea, malice aforethought, or general intent. These are related but distinct concepts. Mens rea is the broad doctrinal category covering all criminal fault states. Malice aforethought is a specific pleading and substantive formula in homicide law. General intent describes a category of criminal culpability. "Wrongfully intending," by contrast, is a civil pleading phrase — a term belonging to the formal language of declarations in tort, not to the vocabulary of criminal indictment or modern statutory drafting. A researcher encountering it in a historical document should not assume it carries the full technical weight of any of these criminal law concepts.
---
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is almost exclusively a creature of common law pleading forms and will appear in historical legal documents — declarations, writs, and pleading precedent books — rather than in modern complaints, statutes, or judicial opinions after the merger of law and equity. Researchers working in pre-code jurisdictions or studying 18th and 19th century tort practice will encounter it regularly; researchers working with post-Field Code materials or modern federal practice will rarely see it.
The key navigational point: encountering "wrongfully intending" in a historical declaration tells you the pleader was alleging intentional or malicious conduct, which shaped the available defenses, the measure of damages (potentially including exemplary damages), and the form of action chosen. It is a signal about the legal theory, not merely descriptive filler.
Because the phrase was formulaic, its presence does not always mean the plaintiff had strong evidence of actual malicious intent — it was often included as a matter of pleading convention. Courts and treatise writers of the period understood this, and historical dictionaries confirm the phrase was recognized as appropriate pleading language rather than a substantive term requiring independent proof in every instance.
For corpus researchers: the phrase clusters with other pleading formulas — "contriving and intending," "fraudulently intending," "well knowing" — that collectively signal intentional tort pleading in the common law tradition. Searching for these formulas together will yield a more complete picture of how motive and intent were alleged before modern notice pleading replaced formal declaration practice.
The Black's 2nd edition source text as preserved appears to contain a transcription artifact, blending an entry about Writers to the Signet (Scottish court officers) with this pleading phrase. Researchers relying on that edition should be aware the entry may be corrupt or mis-paginated in the digitized corpus.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary identify "wrongfully intending" as pleading language appropriate for alleging a defendant's malicious motive. The first edition is clean and direct on this point. The second edition entry as captured in the source material appears garbled — the definition begins mid-sentence with material about Scottish signet clerks before arriving at language consistent with the first edition's definition. This suggests a pagination or scanning error in the digitized source rather than a genuine change in definition between editions.
Neither edition elaborates on which forms of action the phrase was most commonly associated with, how courts treated its omission, or how it interacted with the general issue plea. Historical pleading treatises — Chitty's Pleading in particular — would provide fuller context that the dictionary entries alone do not supply.
The historical dictionaries are in agreement on the core point: this is a term of pleading art, not a substantive legal standard.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs to the English common law pleading tradition and was carried into American practice in the colonial and early national periods. After the adoption of code pleading (beginning with New York's Field Code of 1848) and later the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938), the phrase largely disappeared from American practice. It persisted longer in jurisdictions that retained common law pleading forms.
---