Definition
Personal conduct as evaluated against legal and social standards. In law, behavior refers not merely to action or movement but to the quality of one's conduct measured against norms of propriety, morals, and legal obligation. The term appears most frequently in two legal contexts:
1. Good behavior — Conduct conforming to the requirements of law and community standards of decency. The concept operates both as a condition of office (judges holding tenure "during good behavior") and as a condition of release or recognizance, where a person is bound by surety to conduct themselves lawfully.
2. Disorderly behavior — Conduct that disrupts public order or offends community standards. Treated as a statutory offense in most jurisdictions; may also trigger contempt proceedings depending on context.
In criminal procedure and sentencing, "behavior" functions as a condition or standard: courts assess past behavior to determine risk, and require conforming behavior as a term of probation, parole, or supervised release.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Human conduct relative to social norms; the way a living creature acts generally; a state of probation about one's conduct; an observable response produced by an organism; the way a device or system operates.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Manner of behaving, whether good or bad; mode of conducting one's self; conduct; deportment; carriage — used also of inanimate objects, as the behavior of a ship in a storm or a magnetic needle.
The legal meaning is narrower than the common meaning in one important direction: law is not interested in the behavior of ships or needles. Where the legal meaning expands beyond common usage is in its normative dimension — legal behavior is always behavior measured against a standard of propriety or lawful obligation, not simply action observed neutrally. A researcher encountering "behavior" in legal sources should read it as conduct-under-evaluation, not mere conduct.
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Common Confusion
Behavior vs. conduct: The terms are used interchangeably in most legal contexts, but historical dictionaries show a subtle distinction. "Conduct" is broader and more neutral, encompassing any course of action. "Behavior" in legal usage carries a stronger normative weight — it implies assessment against a standard. Anderson's dictionary defines behavior explicitly as carriage "with respect to propriety, morals, and the requirements of law," while conduct often appears in purely procedural contexts without this evaluative overtone. In modern statutes and judicial opinions the distinction has largely collapsed, but researchers working with historical sources should be alert to it.
Surety of good behavior vs. surety of the peace: Both Black's editions and Bouvier's agree that surety to be of good behavior is a larger requirement than surety to keep the peace. Surety of the peace obligates a person to refrain from specific threatening or violent acts. Surety of good behavior is broader, encompassing general conformity with law and social propriety. A person bound to good behavior who commits any offense, not merely a breach of the peace, may forfeit their recognizance.
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Why It Matters in Research
The critical navigational point for corpus researchers is that "behavior" almost never appears alone as a standalone legal concept — it anchors compound terms that carry distinct technical meanings. Searches for "behavior" without also running "good behavior," "disorderly behavior," and "behavior bond" will miss the substantive doctrine.
The phrase "during good behavior" in connection with judicial tenure has constitutional dimensions and a long common-law history predating American law. Sources treating this phrase in the context of judicial independence will be found under constitutional law and judicial office entries, not under general criminal law or surety materials.
Historical sources use "behavior" in recognizance and surety contexts in ways that differ from modern usage. In older texts, being "put upon good behavior" is a formal judicial act — a magistrate binds a person over — not merely a colloquial description of a condition of release. Modern parole and probation literature uses behavioral language (behavioral conditions, behavioral compliance) in a clinical and administrative register that is distinct from the common-law surety tradition. These two bodies of material are easily conflated when searching.
Anderson's cross-references to CONTEMPT, DISORDER, and ORDER are a useful navigation signal: disorderly behavior sits at the intersection of criminal law, contempt power, and public order doctrine, and corpus researchers should trace all three threads to capture the full scope of the concept.
The latitude noted by Anderson — that "good behavior" is "an expression of so great latitude as to leave much to be determined" — reflects a genuine doctrinal openness that persists into modern law. Courts retain broad discretion in defining what conduct violates a good-behavior condition, which means case law, not statute, drives the meaning in most jurisdictions.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on the core definition: behavior is the manner of conducting oneself, assessed against standards of propriety, morals, and law. The agreement across Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Anderson's on this formulation is strong, and all four draw on Webster's for the baseline meaning — Black's 1st and 2nd editions cite Webster explicitly.
The most instructive point of convergence is the consistent statement that surety for good behavior is a larger requirement than surety to keep the peace. Both Black's editions and Bouvier's flag this without elaboration; Dalton and Burns (cited by Bouvier's) provide the historical common-law authority behind it, situating the concept firmly in English magistrate practice that crossed into American law.
Anderson's is the most analytically developed of the four on this term. The observation that "all persons who are not of good fame may be bound over to good behavior" and that this expression is of "great latitude" captures a historical flexibility in the concept that modern sources have partially replaced with statutory specificity. Where historical sources are weakest: none of the four dictionaries address behavior as a constitutional standard (judicial tenure), a sentencing concept, or a behavioral science concept as imported into modern criminal law. Researchers should not expect the historical dictionaries to bridge into twentieth- or twenty-first-century usage.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase "during good behavior" as a tenure standard for federal judges derives from Article III of the U.S. Constitution and is uniform at the federal level. State judicial tenure standards vary considerably, with many states using fixed terms and retention elections rather than good-behavior tenure. Disorderly behavior statutes are entirely creature of state law and vary widely in definition and scope.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Good Behavior
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Surety of the Peace
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Recognizance
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