Self-help
“self-redress”
idea · 3 works · 3 mentions · 4 anchored passages
self-help · Distraint · extra-judicial redress · private reprisals · self-redress
spoken of as
1 expressionDistraint“self-help”1 mention
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom (English)
The tenderness of early judicial procedure to immemorial barbarism is shown by its partial recognition of the remedy which we call Distraint and the Germans ‘self-help,’ the remedy of private reprisals on the property of an adversary;
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
The private, extra-judicial exercise of force by a creditor against a debtor, later confined and eventually replaced by magistrate-supervised procedure.
Perhaps pignoris capio, like manus injectio, was itself simply an act of regulated Self-redress, when there was no other legal remedy available, and did not amount to legis actio unless it led to a suit in which the legality of the distraint was brought into question.
(1) Self-help, or redress of the plaintiff by his own act, when the creditor arrested the debtor privately by his own authority.
But making a distress is a legalized act of self-redress by a private person, as of a landlord for securing his rent, and may take the place of or precede an action:
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The primitive legal remedy of forcible self-help later regulated by courts.
The tenderness of early judicial procedure to immemorial barbarism is shown by its partial recognition of the remedy which we call Distraint and the Germans ‘self-help,’ the remedy of private reprisals on the property of an adversary;
you, having received an injury, so far availed yourself of the primitive natural remedy of forcible reprisals that you used it, with the sufferance or under the control of the law, to compel your adversary to come into Court.
The Law of Torts
The category of extra-judicial remedy by which a party redresses a wrong through his own lawful act, such as retaking goods or abating a nuisance.
Remedies available to a party by his own act alone may be included, after the example of the long established German usage, in the expressive name of self-help.