Definition
In law, approval is the formal act by which a judge, magistrate, or other authorized official sanctions an instrument — such as a bond, surety, or security — that is required by law to pass official inspection before it becomes operative or takes legal effect. The term captures both the act of review and the act of acceptance: the approving officer examines whether the instrument meets legal requirements and, upon being satisfied, signifies assent in a manner that activates the instrument's legal force.
Approval also appears in contract and commercial contexts as a condition precedent to the formation or performance of an obligation. In sale-on-approval arrangements, for example, a buyer receives goods with the right to accept or return them; no binding contract is complete until approval is signified.
In administrative and regulatory law, approval denotes the affirmative grant of permission by a governmental body — a planning board, regulatory agency, or court — before a party may lawfully proceed with an action, such as recording a subdivision plat or enforcing a settlement agreement.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An expression granting permission or agreement; an acknowledgment that a person, thing, or event meets requirements; an expression of favorable acceptance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Approbation; sanction.
The common meaning of approval is broad and informal — a nod, a compliment, an expression of preference. The legal meaning is narrower and consequential: approval by a judge or magistrate is a formal act that triggers legal effect. The instrument does not merely benefit from official favor; it cannot operate at all without it. Researchers encountering "approval" in historical pleadings or statutory text should determine whether it signals a formal jurisdictional prerequisite or merely descriptive endorsement.
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Common Confusion
Approval is frequently used interchangeably with approbation and allowance in older sources, including Black's first edition. In strict usage, these terms track slightly different concepts: approbation historically emphasized the favorable judgment itself, while approval emphasized the formal act of sanction. Allowance appears in some jurisdictions as the statutory term for specific official acts (allowance of a bond, allowance of a will). The practical overlap is substantial, but researchers using historical sources should not assume these terms are always synonymous — the operative term in a given statute or rule will control what procedural step is required.
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Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap with approval is jurisdictional and temporal inconsistency in what the term triggers. In some statutory schemes, approval is a condition precedent to the instrument having any legal force — a bond not approved by the proper officer is void, not merely voidable. In others, approval is a ministerial act that can be challenged after the fact. Conflating these two effects can produce serious errors in reading historical case law.
In family law sources, court approval of marital settlement agreements occupies a distinct procedural category: the court is not merely recording the parties' agreement but is independently evaluating its fairness, particularly where children are affected. Law Mind corpus researchers moving between contract law and family law materials should be alert to this difference in the weight approval carries.
In land use and real estate sources, approval by a planning commission or similar body is typically a multi-stage administrative process — preliminary approval, final approval, and recordation — each with distinct legal consequences. Historical plat approval requirements vary significantly by era and locality, and older sources may use approval to mean only one stage of what modern practice treats as several distinct steps.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry connects approval expressly to the Latin approbare and the act of a magistrate sanctioning a bond. This framing, rooted in the pre-modern court structure where a judge's personal inspection of sureties was a distinct procedural event, is less visible in modern practice but remains the doctrinal foundation for understanding why approval is a term of art rather than mere synonym for consent.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on a narrow, judicially-centered definition. Both Black's first and second editions describe approval as the act of a judge or magistrate in sanctioning and accepting as satisfactory a bond, security, or other instrument required by law to receive official inspection before becoming operative. The second edition language is slightly more complete: it specifies that the instrument must "pass his inspection and receive his approbation" — language that preserves the distinction between the examination and the formal act of acceptance.
Rapalje & Lawrence add the Latin root and frame the term explicitly as "assent to, or sanction by a magistrate or other judicial officer, of a bond or other instrument required by law to be submitted to him for his approval before taking effect." This is the most precise of the historical formulations and is the most useful for researchers analyzing pre-twentieth-century procedural materials.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the commercial and administrative expansion of the term. The sale-on-approval doctrine, the regulatory approval process in land use law, and the court-approval requirement in family law settlements are largely absent from the nineteenth-century definitions. Researchers working in those areas should use the historical definitions as a baseline but expect that the term carries additional freight in modern statutory and case law contexts.
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Jurisdictional Note
The specific instruments requiring judicial approval before taking effect — and the identity of the officer authorized to grant it — vary by jurisdiction and by subject matter. Bond approval requirements, in particular, differ across state procedural codes. In federal practice, approval of supersedeas bonds and similar instruments is governed by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and local rules. Researchers should not assume that approval requirements from one jurisdiction's sources translate directly to another.
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