Definition
To agree, in law, means to unite in mutual assent — to concur with another person or persons in opinion, purpose, or obligation, particularly through an exchange of promises or the formation of a binding commitment. The term operates at several levels of legal significance depending on context:
1. To assent mutually. In its strictest legal sense, to agree means that two or more parties have consciously and reciprocally concurred — not merely that they hold the same view independently, but that they have communicated and confirmed that shared view. This is the foundational act underlying contract formation.
2. To exchange promises or come to terms. In contract law, to agree is to undertake a mutual obligation — to promise something in exchange for a return promise or act. This is the core meaning in transactional and commercial contexts.
3. To assent or acquiesce (looser usage). In a weaker but recognized usage, to agree means simply to assent to, approve, or adopt a position or decision. Courts and commentators have flagged this as an imprecise use of the term, since unilateral assent falls short of the mutual concurrence that legal agreement properly requires.
4. To concur in a judicial or deliberative context. In reported decisions and legal literature, "agreed" or "agreed to" signals that a court or authority has approved or adopted a proposition — functioning similarly to "accord."
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To be in harmony about an opinion, statement, or action between two or more people; to give assent; to make a stipulation by settling differences or exchanging promises; to correspond or tally.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To harmonize in opinion, statement, or action; to be in unison or concord; to yield assent; to exchange promises or come to terms.
The common and legal meanings are close but not identical in one important respect: ordinary speech permits "agree" to describe mere coincidence of opinion — two people who independently reach the same conclusion can be said to agree. Legal usage requires something more: conscious, communicated, mutual concurrence. Bouvier draws this line explicitly. A researcher reading "the parties agreed" in a historical document must assess whether true mutual assent — and any required exchange — is evidenced, or whether the term is being used loosely to mean only that one party acquiesced.
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Common Confusion
AGREE vs. ASSENT vs. CONSENT: These terms are often used interchangeably in both legal writing and ordinary speech, but they carry distinct weights. To assent is typically unilateral — one party accepts what another has proposed. To consent often carries a permissive or authorization sense (particularly in tort, criminal, and medical law). To agree, properly used, is bilateral or multilateral: it requires the meeting of minds on both sides. The conflation matters most in contract disputes, where a court may find that one party assented to terms without the mutual exchange necessary to constitute a binding agreement.
AGREE vs. AGREEMENT TO AGREE: A statement that parties "agree to agree" on a future term is generally not a binding commitment in modern contract law — courts treat such provisions as unenforceable for indefiniteness. This is a distinct and important trap: historical instruments and modern commercial contracts alike sometimes use "agree" in preliminary or aspirational senses that do not ripen into enforceable obligations. See the Encyclopedia entry on Contracts — Indefiniteness and Agreement to Agree for full treatment.
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Why It Matters in Research
The word "agree" is one of the most heavily freighted and most casually deployed terms in the legal lexicon. Researchers face two recurring problems.
First, loose historical usage. Black's (1st ed.) flags directly that "to assent to a thing, or undertake to do it; to promise" is "a loose and incorrect sense of the term." Historical instruments — deeds, indentures, settlement agreements, court orders — routinely use "agreed" when only one party's acceptance is evidenced, or when the document is recording judicial adoption of a proposition rather than a bilateral contract. Reading "agreed" in a 17th- or 18th-century source as equivalent to a modern signed contract would be an error.
Second, the agreement-to-agree trap. Contracts that leave material terms to future negotiation — price, quantity, duration — and use "agree" or "agreed" language to describe that future process generate recurring litigation. The corpus entry on Contracts — Indefiniteness and Agreement to Agree addresses the doctrinal line between an enforceable framework with gap-filling mechanisms and an unenforceable agreement to negotiate.
Third, the agreed-boundary doctrine in property law creates a specialized usage: neighboring landowners who have long treated a line as their boundary may be held to have "agreed" to that boundary by conduct, even without a formal written instrument. The term here operates through implied mutual recognition rather than express exchange. Researchers working in boundary disputes, adverse possession, or title examination must track this distinct usage. See Boundaries — Establishment, Disputes, and Agreed Boundary Doctrine.
Fourth, in reported decisions and digests, "agreed" in headnotes or syllabus lines signals judicial concurrence with a legal proposition, not a contractual act. Conflating these uses — treating a court's "it is agreed that..." as evidence of party agreement — is a common research error in older materials.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Burrill are the most analytically precise of the historical sources on this term. Bouvier draws the essential distinction between mere coincidence of opinion and true legal agreement: persons are not said to agree simply because they think alike, but because they have consciously concurred — implying conference or exchange of views. Burrill reinforces this, tracing the idea of "mutual action" as the radical concept: to agree properly implies action by and between two or more, not the independent arrival of one mind at a conclusion.
Black's (1st ed.) is candid about the term's looseness in practice, acknowledging both the strict sense (mutual assent, exchange of promises) and the weaker usage (to assent to, to promise unilaterally) while labeling the latter imprecise. This candor is itself instructive for researchers: if Black's acknowledges the slippage, historical documents using the term must be read carefully for which sense is operative.
The Anderson's entry retrieved for this term is not substantively relevant to "agree" — the excerpt appears to be a fragment from an unrelated entry on agency and delegation. This illustrates a known limitation of relying solely on index-based retrieval from historical dictionaries: terms may appear in surrounding text without being the subject of the entry.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the agreement-to-agree problem and the implied-agreement doctrines (including agreed boundary) that developed substantially in later case law. Researchers should treat the historical dictionary entries as foundational on the general definition but should not rely on them for modern doctrinal nuance.
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Jurisdictional Note
The core meaning of "agree" as mutual assent is uniform across common law jurisdictions, but the enforceability consequences of particular agreements — especially agreements to agree — vary. Some jurisdictions impose good-faith negotiation duties that can give limited legal effect to preliminary agreements; others treat them as wholly unenforceable. Choice-of-law analysis is essential when a document uses "agree" in a preliminary or framework context.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Contracts — Indefiniteness and Agreement to Agree (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)
Boundaries — Establishment, Disputes, and Agreed Boundary Doctrine (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia)
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