Definition
Appellee is the party against whom an appeal is taken — the winning party in the court below who must defend the judgment on appeal. The appellee's interest lies in having the lower court's decision affirmed and left undisturbed. The term is opposed to appellant, who is the party bringing the appeal.
In older English practice, "appellee" carried a distinct second meaning in criminal law: the person accused by an approver (a co-conspirator who turned King's evidence) in a proceeding known as an appeal of felony. In that now-obsolete context, the appellee was the accused, not the defending party in a civil appeal. This archaic usage has no practical relevance in modern courts but appears in historical sources and must not be confused with the procedural meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A respondent.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The defendant in an appeal; opposed to appellant. The person who is appealed against, or accused of crime; opposed to appellor.
The common definitions track the legal meaning closely, making this one of the rarer terms where ordinary usage and legal usage are nearly aligned. The Webster's 1913 entry preserves both the procedural and the archaic criminal meanings, a distinction that modern common usage has dropped entirely.
Common Confusion
APPELLEE VS. RESPONDENT
Appellee and respondent are often used interchangeably to describe the party opposing an appeal, and many courts and jurisdictions prefer one term over the other as a matter of local practice or rule. They are functionally equivalent in appellate procedure. The distinction, where it exists at all, is largely stylistic. Researchers reading historical sources should expect both terms to appear for the same procedural role without any difference in legal significance.
Why It Matters in Research
Appellee is a positional term — it describes a party's role in a specific proceeding, not a fixed legal status. The same party can be appellant in one appeal and appellee in a cross-appeal or a subsequent proceeding. This matters when tracing a case through multiple levels of review in historical records.
The archaic criminal law usage in Black's 2nd Ed. is a research trap. When historical sources use "appellee" in discussions of treason, felony, approvers, or appeals of felony, the word does not refer to appellate procedure at all — it refers to the accused in a private criminal accusation. These two meanings share a term but describe entirely different proceedings, and conflating them distorts the historical record.
Jurisdictional variation in preferred terminology affects corpus navigation. Federal courts and most modern state courts use appellee, but some jurisdictions — particularly in equity practice and in courts modeled on English chancery procedure — used respondent as the standard label. Historical sources from equity courts, admiralty courts, and some state appellate systems may use respondent where appellee would be expected. Burrill's cross-reference to "Respondent" reflects this parallel usage.
When researching appellate practice across time periods, researchers should treat appellee and respondent as interchangeable signals pointing to the same procedural role, and search both terms to ensure complete results.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four shelf sources agree on the core definition: the appellee is the party against whom an appeal is taken. The definitions are brief and largely identical across Black's 1st Ed., Bouvier's, and Burrill's, reflecting the term's uncomplicated procedural nature.
Burrill adds linguistic context, noting the French origin (appelle) and explicitly cross-referencing respondent as the more common alternative. This cross-reference is editorially significant — it signals that even in mid-nineteenth century practice, appellee was not the universal term and that practitioners moved freely between the two labels.
Black's 2nd Ed. provides the fullest treatment, adding the adversarial interest test — the appellee is "the party who has an interest adverse to setting aside or reversing the judgment" — and preserving the archaic criminal law meaning at the close of the entry. The citation to Slayton v. Horsey is the only case reference across all four sources, illustrating the Texas courts' articulation of the interest-based definition. Black's 2nd Ed.'s inclusion of the old felony-appeal usage is important: it documents a genuine historical meaning that later dictionaries and common usage have discarded, and it is the only source in this corpus to do so explicitly.
Webster's 1913, by citing Blackstone for the criminal usage, confirms that the dual meaning was recognized in authoritative common-law commentary, not merely in legal dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal courts use "appellee" as the standard term under the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. Some state courts, particularly those with older equity traditions or English procedural inheritance, use "respondent" interchangeably or exclusively. When working in historical state court records, researchers should verify local terminology before concluding that the absence of "appellee" signals the absence of appellate proceedings.