A demand of a right; sometimes used of the legal right asserted, as a creditor's claim to be paid the amount due him, sometimes of the amount alleged to be due. In both these senses the term is commonly employed in bankruptcy and other creditors' proceedings against an insolvent debtor, and in the administration of the estates of deceased persons.

In all such cases the claim must be proved i.e. verified by oath, in order to share in the distribution of the assets; the duty of the trustee in the former case and of the executor or administrator in the latter, being limited to the payment of duly authenticated claims against the estate.

At the common law, a claim was a formal assertion of title to or of interest in property, real or personal, which was in the possession of another. It was not a mere protest against an unlawful seisin or detainer of property, but was a recognized process for preserving the rights of the claimant against extinction by reason of lapse of time or other cause. It had, therefore, much of the effect of an actual entry upon land, and was available to one who, by reason of his interest being a future and not a present one (as a remainder or reversion), was not entitled to make an immediate entry; or, as Coke explains, "when a person dares not make an entry on land for fear of being beaten or other injury, he may approach as near as he can to land and claim the same, and that shall be sufficient to vest the seisin in him." In other cases, however, in which the claimant's right depended on possession, it seems to have been considered that, to make a claim to an estate effective, there must be an actual entry into some part of the lands claimed.

Continual claim was the process whereby one who had been disseised of lands prevented his claim from lapsing by reason of the death of his disseisor, and the transmission of the lands to the latter's heir by descent. In order to avoid this consequence, it was necessary to make claim within a year and a day of the disseisor's death, and, to insure this, to repeat the formality continually within that interval until the descent took place.

In the United States the term 'claim' has acquired a distinctive sense as applied to the initial or prima-facie title acquired by settlers to Government lands, and by prospectors to mineral lands, under United States statutes. The term is also applied to the land so secured. These claims may, upon the performance of the terms of sale, ripen into complete and valid titles; but, in the meantime, they confer on the claimant or holder a recognized though defeasible property right, which may be bought and sold and administered upon, like any other property. Because of its precarious nature, it is generally considered personal rather than real property.

In admiralty proceedings the statement of rights of the defendant or other party to property attached under process of the court is called the 'claim.'

Statement of claim is the pleading in which the plaintiff sets forth the facts constituting his cause of action. It supersedes the declaration in England, and corresponds to the complaint in the code practice of most of the United States. The facts are alleged in it in a plain, concise, and natural way, avoiding the arbitrary forms that characterized the declaration in common-law pleading. The phrase is used in some jurisdictions to designate any narrative of facts that is made the basis of a judicial or official proceeding. See DECLARATION; PLEADING.

Claim of Liberty, in English law, is a petition to the sovereign, filed in the Court of Exchequer, claiming a privilege or immunity, as freedom from jury duty, by virtue of custom or the petitioner's rank. The claim was made under an actual or supposed grant, as these 'liberties or franchises' were said to have originally been a part of the Crown's prerogative, which could only be enjoyed by a subject by virtue of a grant from the sovereign.