Definition
To formally designate or select a person to fill an office, role, or position of trust; or, in property law, to direct the disposition of an estate or interest pursuant to a power granted for that purpose.
The term carries two distinct legal contexts:
1. OFFICE AND AGENCY: To nominate or constitute a person as an officer, agent, representative, or fiduciary. In this sense, the word operates as an act of formal selection — a court appoints a guardian, an executive appoints an officer, a testator appoints an executor. No property interest passes through the act of appointment itself; the word designates a person for a function, not a conveyance to that person.
2. PROPERTY AND CONVEYANCING: To exercise a power of appointment — that is, to direct, by authority previously granted in a deed or will, how an estate or interest shall be distributed or limited. Here the word is a term of art in equity and conveyancing: the appointing party does not own the property outright but holds authority to designate who shall take it. The appointment creates, raises, or redirects a use or beneficial interest in accordance with the terms of the governing instrument.
These two meanings share a common core — an act of formal designation by authority — but diverge sharply in legal effect and the body of law governing each.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To set or fix a time or place by authority or agreement; to name someone to a post or role; to furnish or equip a place completely.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To fix with power or firmness; to establish; to ordain; to prescribe; to fix by decree, command, or mutual agreement.
The common-language sense of "appoint" — naming someone to a job or setting a time for a meeting — tracks the office-and-agency legal meaning reasonably well. The gap that matters is the property sense: ordinary usage gives no indication that "appoint" can describe the exercise of a legal power over someone else's estate. A researcher encountering "appoint" in a deed, will, or equity instrument should always ask whether a power of appointment is in play, not merely a designation of persons.
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Common Confusion
APPOINT (office) vs. APPOINT (power of appointment): The same verb governs two very different operations. When a court "appoints" a guardian, it selects a person for a role. When a donor "appoints" property under a power, the word triggers an entirely separate body of doctrine governing whether the appointment is general or special, whether it is effectively exercised, and whether it is subject to creditors' claims. Bouvier expressly notes that "appoint" is never employed to convey an estate in the first sense — but in the second sense, directing a disposition is precisely its function. Context — specifically, the presence of a governing power instrument — determines which meaning applies.
APPOINT vs. ELECT: In the context of public officers, appointment and election are mutually exclusive methods of filling positions, with distinct constitutional and statutory frameworks governing each. Historical sources sometimes use the terms loosely. Modern research should distinguish carefully, as the method of selection affects tenure, removal authority, and constitutional analysis.
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Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of "appoint" is a persistent trap in historical legal materials. A deed from the eighteenth or nineteenth century using "appoint" almost certainly invokes the conveyancing sense — powers of appointment were a primary tool of family settlement under English equity practice and traveled into American law. A statute or judicial order using the same word is almost certainly designating a person for a role. Reading the wrong sense into the wrong context produces serious misunderstanding.
In the Law Mind corpus, "appoint" appears across multiple encyclopedia domains that do not cross-reference each other: guardianship appointments in family and probate law, court-appointed expert designations under Rule 706 in civil procedure, and the doctrine of powers of appointment in trusts and estates. A search across these materials without attention to context will return results that share only the word, not the legal concept.
Researchers working in historical equity materials should note that Burrill's definition is more useful than Bouvier's for the property sense. Burrill captures the technical equity meaning — directing a new disposition of an estate already conveyed by virtue of a power — while Bouvier focuses almost entirely on the nomination/agency meaning. Neither gives the full picture alone.
In American constitutional research, "appoint" carries additional freight from the Appointments Clause (Art. II, Sec. 2), which governs the appointment of federal officers by the President, courts of law, and heads of departments. This constitutional dimension is absent from both historical dictionaries and is worth flagging when researching federal agency personnel or the distinction between principal and inferior officers.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Burrill take complementary but partially divergent approaches. Bouvier treats "appoint" primarily as a word of nomination and selection — designating persons, not conveying property — and notes that equivalent words include "nominate," "select," "designate," and "choose." Burrill, by contrast, leads with the equity and conveyancing sense, tracing the term to its use in directing the limitation of uses and the substitution of new beneficial interests under existing conveyances.
The two sources are not in conflict; they are addressing different dimensions of the same term. But neither synthesizes the full picture, and neither addresses the constitutional appointment power that American practice layered onto the common-law foundation. Burrill's technical precision on the property side is the more specialized resource; Bouvier's is more useful for agency and office contexts.
Both sources predate the modern administrative state, and neither accounts for the dense regulatory significance of "appointment" in federal administrative law, where the distinction between appointment and lesser forms of designation (assignment, delegation, designation) carries constitutional consequence.
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