Claim

VI, AUT PRECARIO. By force, stealth, or importunity.

n. 1. Achallenge of the property or ownership of a thing which is wrongfully withheld from the possession of the ¢laimant. Plowd, 3859. A claim is a right or title, actual or supposed, to a debt, privilege, or other thing in the possession of another; not the possession, but the means by or through which the claimant obtains the possession or enjoyment. 2N. Y. 245, 254. A claim is, ina just, juridical sense, a demand of some matter as of right made by one person upon another, to do or to forbear to do some act or thing as a mutter of duty. A more limited, but at the same time an equally expressive, defluition was given by Lord Dyer, that “a claim is a challenge by a man of the propriety or ownership of a thing, which he has not in possession, but which Is wrongfully detained from him.” 16 Pet. 615. “Claim” has generally been defined as a demand for 1 thing, the ownership of which, or an interast in which, is in the cluimant, but the possession of which is wrongfully withheld by another. But a broader meaning must be accorded to it. A demand for damages for criminal conversation with plaintiff's wife is a claim; bat it would be doing violence to language to say that such damages are property of plaintifi which defendant withholds. In common parlance the noun “claim” meaus an assertion, a pretension; and the verb is olten used (not quite correctly) as a synonym for “state,” “urge,” “insist,” or “assert.” Ina statute authorizing the courts to order a bill of particulars of the “claim” of either party, “claim” is co-extensive with “case,"and embraces all causes of action and all srounds of defense, the pleas of both parties, and pleas in confession and avoidance, no less than complaints and counter-clauims. It warrants ina libel suit to furnish particulars of the facts relied upon in justification. 6 Daly, 446. 2. Under the mechanic’s lien law of Pennsylvania, a demand put on record by a mechanie or materjal-man against a building for work or material contributeu to its erection is called a “claim.” 3. Under the land laws of the United States, the tract of land taken up by a pre emptioner or other settler (and also his possession of the same) is called a “claim.”