Definition
The appellee is the party against whom an appeal is taken — that is, the party who prevailed in the lower court or tribunal and who must defend that result on appeal. The appellee did not initiate the appellate proceeding; rather, the appellant (or, in older usage, the appellant-accuser) brought the matter to the higher court, and the appellee responds.
Note on spelling: The correct modern spelling is APPELLEE (double-e at the end). APPELLE, as rendered in older French-derived legal sources, is an archaic variant. The two refer to the same procedural role. This entry treats them as equivalent and uses the modern form throughout.
In criminal appellate practice, the appellee is typically the prosecution when a defendant appeals a conviction, or the defendant when the government appeals an acquittal or sentencing order. In civil practice, the appellee is whichever party won the judgment or order being challenged.
Common Confusion
APPELLE / APPELLEE vs. APPELLANT: These terms are routinely transposed, especially in handwritten or transcribed historical records where the doubled final syllable is easily dropped. The appellant is the party who lost below and is seeking reversal. The appellee is the party who won below and is defending the result. In old Anglo-Norman practice, the distinction carried additional weight: the appellant was literally the accuser in a private criminal appeal, and the appelle (appellee) was the accused — a framing that does not map neatly onto modern appellate roles. Researchers working with pre-modern sources should be alert to this inversion of apparent meaning.
APPELLE vs. RESPONDENT: In some appellate courts and jurisdictions, the defending party on appeal is called the respondent rather than the appellee. The terms are functionally equivalent in most contexts, but court rules vary. Federal circuit courts generally use appellee; some state supreme courts and many administrative tribunals prefer respondent.
Why It Matters in Research
The archaic spelling APPELLE (single final e, reflecting the Law French origin) appears in early English and American legal sources, including Britton and treatises drawing on Anglo-Norman procedure. Researchers using digitized historical corpora should search both spellings, as OCR errors and period orthography will scatter instances across both forms.
More substantively, the role of the appelle in the old appeal of felony — a private accusatory proceeding — was distinct from the modern appellee's role. In the appeal of felony, the appelle was the accused defending against a private criminal charge, not simply a prevailing party defending a favorable judgment. Burrill's citation to Britton (c. 23) places this usage squarely in the medieval English criminal procedure context. Importing that meaning into modern appellate research would be an error.
For corpus researchers tracing the development of appellate procedure, the terminological shift from the accusatorial appelle to the modern appellee tracking a judgment-defense role is itself a data point about the transformation of English criminal procedure. The appeal of felony was largely abolished in England by the early nineteenth century; American law never fully adopted it. By the time American legal dictionaries were being systematically compiled, appelle in the old sense was already an antiquarianism.
When researching appellate jurisdiction questions — particularly remand orders and the reviewability of district court decisions — the identity of the appellee matters procedurally: standing to defend, briefing obligations, and cross-appeal deadlines all attach to this party designation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives a compact but accurate entry: "L. Fr. In old practice. The party accused by the process of appeal." The citation to Britton (c. 23) anchors the term in thirteenth-century English legal writing. Burrill's cross-reference to "Appeal" signals that the full procedural context — the appeal of felony as a private accusatory mechanism — is necessary to understand what appelle meant in that system.
What Burrill does not provide is any bridge to the modern appellee. That gap is expected given the dictionary's historical orientation, but it means researchers relying solely on Burrill for this term will get the archaic criminal-procedure meaning without guidance on how the term evolved into its current procedural usage. Later American dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier) address the modern appellee directly and should be consulted alongside Burrill for any research spanning both historical and contemporary sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Remand — 28 U.S.C. 1447 and Appellate Review of Remand Orders (The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia): Relevant for researchers working on the appellate posture of remand orders, where the identity and strategic position of the appellee shapes the reviewability analysis.