Definition
A term drawn from divorce law, borrowed by analogy from criminal law. An accessary to adultery is a person who knowingly facilitates, assists, or enables one spouse to commit adultery — for example, by providing opportunity, concealment, or direct assistance to the adulterous relationship. The term does not describe a party to a crime in the modern sense; it describes a third party whose conduct was relevant to fault-based divorce proceedings, particularly in jurisdictions where the conduct of third parties could bear on the equities of the case or on defenses such as connivance.
Common Confusion
ACCESSARY TO ADULTERY vs. CONNIVANCE: These concepts are related but distinct. Connivance is a defense available to a spouse accused of adultery, asserting that the other spouse consented to or deliberately arranged the adultery. An accessary to adultery, by contrast, is typically a third party outside the marriage who aided the adulterous conduct. A spouse who acts as an accessary to their own partner's adultery may simultaneously be the party whose conduct establishes a connivance defense. Researchers should not treat the two terms as interchangeable.
ACCESSARY TO ADULTERY vs. CORESPONDENT: In divorce practice, particularly in English ecclesiastical and early common law courts, the third party with whom adultery was committed was called the corespondent. The accessary to adultery is a broader category — it may include persons who assisted the adultery without themselves being a sexual participant.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to the historical record of fault-based divorce law and has little practical currency in modern American or English family law. Researchers will encounter it primarily in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century divorce cases, treatises, and ecclesiastical court records from periods when adultery was both a ground for divorce and a legally defined wrong carrying procedural consequences.
Several research traps apply. First, the spelling: historical sources use both "accessary" and "accessory" without consistency; both spellings appear in legal materials, and search queries should account for both. Second, the term's origin in criminal law means that pre-divorce-reform sources sometimes import criminal law concepts — principal, accessary before the fact, accessary after the fact — into what is functionally a civil and ecclesiastical context. Do not assume that criminal law definitions of accessaryship map cleanly onto the divorce law usage. Third, the relevance of this concept collapsed with the rise of no-fault divorce. In jurisdictions that have abolished fault-based grounds entirely, the term has no operative legal meaning and will appear only in historical materials.
Corpus researchers working on fault-based divorce should treat this term as a node connecting to the broader cluster of fault concepts: connivance, condonation, collusion, and recrimination. These defenses and related doctrines formed an interlocking system in traditional divorce law, and understanding accessary to adultery requires situating it within that system.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary identifies this as a phrase used in the law of divorce, explicitly noting its derivation from criminal law. The entry is brief and offers limited analytical depth, but the cross-derivation note is significant: it signals that courts and commentators self-consciously borrowed criminal law architecture to structure liability and responsibility questions in the divorce context.
What Black's does not address — and what researchers should flag — is that the practical legal consequences of being characterized as an accessary to adultery varied considerably across jurisdictions and across time. In some contexts the designation was relevant to damages in alienation of affections actions; in others it bore on whether a divorce decree could be granted or on the terms of alimony. Historical dictionaries alone will not resolve these jurisdictional and procedural questions; primary sources are necessary.
Jurisdictional Note
This term's relevance is almost entirely confined to jurisdictions that retained or retain fault-based divorce grounds. English ecclesiastical courts and their successor divorce courts developed the most elaborate doctrine; American state courts varied considerably in how far they imported English concepts. Researchers should not assume uniform treatment across state lines even within a single historical period.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Divorce — Fault-Based Grounds (Adultery, Cruelty, Desertion, Imprisonment), The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia