Definition
The formal process by which a widow's dower interest in her deceased husband's real property is identified, measured, and set apart for her actual use and enjoyment. Because dower at common law entitled a widow to a life estate in one-third of all qualifying lands her husband held during the marriage, assignment was the necessary step that converted this abstract, inchoate right into a concrete, possessable portion of specific land. Until assignment occurred, the widow had a claim against the land but no identified parcel to occupy or enjoy. After assignment, she held a defined life estate in a designated portion, typically set off by metes and bounds or other sufficient description.
Assignment could be accomplished in one of two ways: voluntarily, by the heir, devisee, guardian, or other person holding the land subject to dower (called assignment in pais, or out of court); or compulsorily, through judicial proceedings when the parties could not agree or when the heir refused to act.
Common Confusion
Assignment of dower should not be confused with dower itself. Dower is the underlying right — the widow's inchoate claim attaching to all qualifying lands from the moment of marriage. Assignment of dower is the downstream act that gives that right physical form. A widow who died before assignment had still possessed dower; she simply never had it allocated. Researchers will also encounter the phrase "assignment of dower" used loosely to describe the writ or action brought to compel assignment, not merely the assignment event itself. Context determines which meaning applies.
Do not conflate assignment of dower with quarantine (the widow's common law right to remain in the principal mansion for forty days after her husband's death while awaiting assignment) or with her election between dower and a statutory share under modern law. These are distinct concepts that frequently appear in the same historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs squarely to a body of law that has been abolished or fundamentally transformed in virtually every American jurisdiction. Dower as a common law institution was eliminated or replaced by elective share statutes across most states during the twentieth century, and assignment of dower as a formal legal proceeding has largely followed it into obsolescence. Researchers must be alert to the time period of their sources: pre-abolition materials treat assignment as a live procedural question with active case law; post-abolition materials address it only historically or in the context of transitional claims.
In historical sources, the distinction between voluntary and compulsory assignment carries significant practical weight. Voluntary assignment in pais bound the widow if she accepted it, even without court involvement, but its validity depended on proper execution and, in some jurisdictions, the widow's independent acknowledgment apart from her husband's influence — a concept that intersects with the law governing married women's separate acknowledgments on deeds. Researchers working with nineteenth-century conveyancing records will find assignment of dower appearing in title chains: land could not be freely alienated without the widow's dower being either assigned, released, or barred, and clouded titles frequently trace back to an assignment that was defective or a release that was improperly taken.
The corpus connection to broader assignment law is weak. The "assignment" in assignment of dower has nothing to do with the commercial law concept of assigning a contract or transferring a chose in action. The Latin root assignatio dotis, noted in Burrill, confirms this is a term of art drawn from real property and marital law. Researchers who enter this term expecting contract-assignment doctrine will be in the wrong body of law entirely.
Jurisdictional variation in the period when dower was still operative was substantial: which lands were subject, what constituted valid assignment, whether court proceedings were required, and what remedies a widow had for defective assignment all varied by state. English decisions and treatises influenced American courts but were not universally followed.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries converge on the core meaning without significant disagreement. All treat assignment of dower as the act of marking out and setting apart the widow's one-third share of qualifying lands. Burrill provides the most precise formulation — "designating it by metes and bounds, or other sufficient description, and allotting it to her as her portion" — which captures both the physical and the legal character of the act. Black's is compact but accurate. Bouvier is the most useful historically, noting both modes of assignment (in pais and judicial) and citing a range of American cases, though his citations run to mid-nineteenth-century reporters that researchers will need to trace through modern finding tools.
Rapalje & Lawrence offer no independent entry, instead cross-referencing to their general Assignment entry — a reminder that nineteenth-century legal dictionaries varied widely in their treatment of compound terms, and that the general entry for a root word often contains material relevant to its specialized compounds.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural machinery of compulsory assignment in detail, the effect of defective assignment on subsequent title, or the interaction between assignment and the emerging married women's property acts of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. For those questions, treatises — particularly on real property and on the law of dower specifically — are the necessary next step.
Jurisdictional Note
Dower and its assignment were creatures of common law, modified significantly by statute in every American jurisdiction. Most states abolished common law dower and replaced it with elective share or forced heirship provisions during the twentieth century. A minority of states retained modified dower forms longer. Researchers should determine the specific jurisdiction and period before applying any general principle drawn from historical sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry addresses dower or its assignment directly. The encyclopedia entries on assignment of rights in contracts (contracts_102), assignment of income in tax (tax_9), and assignment and subletting in landlord-tenant law (property_27) address a different legal concept sharing the same root word and are not relevant to this entry.