Definition
The extinction of a person's civil rights and legal capacities that occurred upon the pronouncement of a death sentence for treason or felony. Attainder represented the legal death of the condemned: the person could no longer own property, bring suit, inherit, or transmit an estate to heirs. Everything the attainted person possessed escheated to the Crown (in English law) or to the state.
Attainder differed from conviction. Conviction was the verdict of guilt, rendered before judgment was pronounced and subject to reversal on points of law. Attainder attached after judgment of death was recorded against the condemned and was therefore a consequence of sentence, not merely of the finding of guilt.
The doctrine carried two principal incidents: (1) forfeiture of all lands and goods to the sovereign, and (2) corruption of blood, meaning the attainted person could neither inherit from ancestors nor transmit property to descendants, effectively severing the legal bloodline.
In American law, attainder as a judicial consequence was rendered obsolete by the Constitution. The Bill of Attainder — legislative condemnation of a named person without trial — is separately prohibited. These are related but distinct concepts that must not be conflated.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The state a prisoner entered once a death sentence (usually for treason) had been issued; the state of being stripped of all civil rights. Also: a stain or state of dishonor or condemnation (archaic).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of attainting, or the state of being attainted; the extinction of civil rights consequent upon sentence of death or outlawry. Also, a stain or state of dishonor (obsolete). Webster's additionally notes: Bill of attainder — a bill brought into or passed by a legislative body, condemning a named person.
The common and legal definitions track each other closely for the core meaning, but the common-language sources fold in the "bill of attainder" without clearly distinguishing legislative from judicial attainder. In legal research, this distinction is critical: judicial attainder (a court-imposed consequence of conviction) is a historical relic; the bill of attainder prohibition is live constitutional law. A researcher who treats these as the same concept will misread both historical sources and modern caselaw.
Common Confusion
Three terms travel together and are frequently conflated:
ATTAINDER refers to the extinction of civil rights and corruption of blood that followed a death sentence. It is a judicial consequence.
BILL OF ATTAINDER refers to a legislative act condemning a named person or identifiable group without judicial trial. The U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress (Article I, Section 9) and state legislatures (Article I, Section 10) from passing bills of attainder.
CORRUPTION OF BLOOD is the hereditary component of attainder — the disability that prevented the condemned from passing property to heirs or receiving it from ancestors. The U.S. Constitution separately prohibits corruption of blood as a consequence of conviction for treason (Article III, Section 3), limiting forfeiture to the lifetime of the attainted person.
Historical dictionaries frequently treat all three as aspects of "attainder" without separating them cleanly. Modern constitutional law treats them as analytically distinct prohibitions.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Attainder by confession: Arising from a guilty plea entered before the judges of the court, or — in the historical English practice of sanctuary — before a coroner. No jury verdict was required.
Attainder by verdict: The standard form, arising from a jury finding of guilt followed by judgment of death.
Attainder by outlawry: Arising when a person fled or refused to appear and was formally declared an outlaw. Rapalje & Lawrence specifically notes that judgment of outlawry, as well as judgment of death, could produce attainder.
Bill of attainder: Legislative rather than judicial in origin. Passed by a Parliament or legislature to condemn a specific person or class. Constitutionally prohibited in the United States.
Why It Matters in Research
Attainder is primarily a historical term in American law, but it surfaces in three live research contexts that require careful navigation.
Constitutional prohibition research: The Bill of Attainder Clauses (Article I, Sections 9 and 10) generate ongoing litigation. Courts have applied the prohibition to legislative acts that effectively punish identifiable individuals or groups without trial. Researchers working in this area must distinguish the historical English doctrine from the constitutional test as it has evolved in American courts. Historical dictionaries define attainder from the English common law perspective and are of limited direct use for modern constitutional analysis.
Historical property and inheritance disputes: In research touching colonial-era or early American property records, attainder has direct relevance. Loyalist attainder statutes passed by colonial and state legislatures during and after the American Revolution confiscated Loyalist property. These legislative acts blur the line between bills of attainder and ordinary forfeiture statutes, and historical dictionary sources do not address this American context.
Corruption of blood: Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution explicitly forbids corruption of blood as a consequence of treason conviction. Research on the scope of treason penalties requires understanding this term. Historical dictionaries embed corruption of blood within their attainder definitions without flagging the constitutional limitation.
Trap for researchers: The historical dictionaries in this corpus define attainder primarily in English terms — the Crown, forfeiture to the sovereign, sanctuary, the coroner. These details do not map directly onto American law, which rejected the doctrine while preserving the constitutional prohibitions against its legislative form. Do not import English common law consequences of attainder into American legal analysis without confirming whether any state statute adopted, modified, or rejected them.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries in this corpus are in strong agreement on the core definition. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, Burrill's, and Rapalje & Lawrence all converge on the formulation drawn from Stephen's Commentaries: attainder is the extinction of civil rights and capacities following a sentence of death for treason or felony. The uniformity of this definition across sources reflects its derivation from a single well-settled English common law doctrine.
Burrill's adds useful texture, noting the derivation from the French atteindre (to reach or overtake) and teindre (to taint or stain), and identifying the attainted person as attinctus — stained or blackened. This linguistic framing illuminates why "corruption of blood" was understood as a kind of hereditary moral and legal stain, not merely a property rule.
Bouvier's notes the forms of attainder by confession — including the now-archaic practice of confession before a coroner in sanctuary — which is historically useful for understanding medieval and early modern English procedure but irrelevant to American practice.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underperform: None of them adequately addresses the American constitutional transformation of attainder. They treat the doctrine as still operative English law, without integrating the constitutional prohibitions that had already rendered judicial attainder extinct in the United States by the time most of these dictionaries were written. A researcher relying solely on these sources would not understand that the bill of attainder prohibition had already generated a body of American constitutional interpretation with its own distinct analytical framework.
Jurisdictional Note
Judicial attainder has no operative force in any American jurisdiction. The constitutional prohibitions make it a matter of historical study only. The bill of attainder prohibition applies to both federal and state legislatures. Individual states vary in how broadly they interpret legislative acts that may constitute functional bills of attainder, and researchers should not assume that constitutional doctrine in this area is uniform across circuits.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Bill of Attainder; Corruption of Blood; Treason (Constitutional Dimensions); Forfeiture