Definition
APPROVER has two distinct legal meanings, one in criminal law and one in real property law. The criminal law meaning is primary and historically significant; the property meaning is narrower and largely obsolete.
1. Criminal Law. An accomplice in a crime who, upon arraignment and before entering a plea, confesses guilt and accuses one or more companions of the same offense, in exchange for the possibility of a pardon or reduced punishment. The approver testifies under oath against co-defendants and was historically required to substantiate the accusation — in early English practice, sometimes by wager of battle. In later usage, an approver is essentially what modern practice calls a state's witness or informant who has turned against co-conspirators. In England the approver was also called "Queen's Evidence" (or "King's Evidence"), a phrase that survives in British legal vocabulary.
2. Real Property Law (historical). In the law of commons and waste, an approver was a lord of the manor who exercised the right to enclose or improve portions of common land, provided sufficient common remained for those entitled to use it. This sense is rare in American law and largely obsolete in practice.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who approves or gives approval; in English common law, a person who accuses a confederate.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who approves. Formerly, one who made proof or trial. An informer; an accuser (obs.).
The everyday sense of "approver" — someone who grants approval — has no legal content. A researcher encountering "approver" in historical legal sources should not read it as a reference to any approval process. The legal term is a term of art rooted in the Latin approbator/probator (one who proves or vouches), referring specifically to a self-confessed felon turned witness, not a decision-maker granting assent.
---
Common Confusion
APPROVER is sometimes confused with INFORMER or WITNESS, but it occupies a precise procedural position: the approver must confess guilt personally before entering a plea, and historically the accusation had to be made at arraignment. A mere witness for the prosecution who denies personal guilt is not an approver. Similarly, the property law sense (enclosure of common land) is entirely unrelated to the criminal law sense, and early dictionary entries sometimes print both definitions in close proximity, creating a risk of misreading. The word "approvement" compounds the confusion because it refers to both the process of making an approver in the criminal sense and the enclosure of common land in the property sense — two wholly different legal acts sharing one label.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English criminal law history will encounter "approver" most frequently in sources dealing with medieval and early modern felony procedure, where it describes a formal procedural mechanism with specific requirements: confession before plea, oath, and the obligation to prove the accusation. The procedural rules around approvers are strict and chronologically bounded — by the nineteenth century the institution was largely displaced by modern evidentiary practice and statutory frameworks for accomplice testimony.
Key navigational points:
First, the timing requirement matters in historical sources. An approver had to act before plea — a detail that distinguishes approver procedure from ordinary accomplice testimony and affects how older cases and treatises describe the evidence. Sources that discuss whether a confession was timely enough to qualify the speaker as an approver are addressing this threshold.
Second, the property law meaning appears almost exclusively in English sources on common rights and enclosure. American researchers are unlikely to encounter it in U.S. case law, but it surfaces in English real property treatises that are part of the historical common law background. Seeing "approver" in a document about common land does not signal anything about criminal informants.
Third, the modern analog — cooperating witness, state's witness, government informant — carries its own procedural framework under contemporary law that differs substantially from approver doctrine. Researchers should not project modern plea cooperation concepts backward onto historical approver sources, or vice versa.
Fourth, because "approver" appears in Law French (aprover) as well as Latin forms (approbator, probator), early Year Book materials and Anglo-Norman sources may render the term differently. Burrill's cross-reference to the Latin root is a useful anchor for searching older sources.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
The major historical dictionaries agree on the criminal law core: an approver is a self-confessing felon who accuses accomplices before plea, with a view to obtaining a pardon. Bouvier, Burrill, and both editions of Black's track consistently on this point, with Burrill providing the most technically precise formulation — requiring that the confession occur at arraignment before plea, that the admission be followed by an oath, and that the court exercise discretion in accepting the approver's accusation.
Bouvier adds the important historical detail that the approver was obliged to maintain the truth of the charge — a reference to trial by combat, the early common law mechanism by which the accused could challenge the approver's accusation physically. This wager of battle element is historically significant but had fallen out of use long before these dictionaries were compiled; Bouvier preserves it as a historical note rather than a live rule.
Black's (1st ed.) also references the use of "certain men sent into the several counties" — a different and administratively distinct use of the term in old English administrative practice, referring to royal agents rather than criminal informants. This usage is peripheral to the primary meaning and rarely appears in American legal sources.
The real property sense (approvement of common land) appears in Black's (2nd ed.) and briefly in Black's (1st ed.), sourced to Blackstone and Crabb's Real Property. The historical dictionaries give this meaning little room because it was already archaic by the time of compilation. A researcher finding the property sense in Blackstone's Commentaries should treat it as a doctrine of English land law not transplanted into American common law in any robust form.
No major historical dictionary adequately addresses the transition from approver doctrine to modern accomplice-witness practice — a gap researchers must bridge using criminal procedure treatises and case law rather than these reference sources alone.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The approver in the criminal law sense is primarily an institution of English common law and has no formal analog in American procedural law. American courts developed separate doctrines governing accomplice testimony and cooperation agreements under statutory and constitutional frameworks. Researchers working in American jurisdictions will find "approver" only in sources discussing the historical English background, not as a live procedural category.
---