Definition
A person obstinately wedded to a particular opinion, belief, or creed, especially in matters of religion, to the exclusion of contrary views. In the historical legal sense, the term describes a quality of mind — stubborn, closed adherence to one's own position — rather than a legally operative status or classification. It does not, in itself, denominate a cause of action, a party classification, or a legal remedy.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who is narrow-mindedly devoted to their own ideas and groups, and intolerant of people of differing ideas, races, genders, religions, or politics.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A person who regards their own faith and views in matters of religion as unquestionably right, and any differing belief as unreasonable or wicked; in extended sense, one obstinately and blindly devoted to their own opinions in politics or morals.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is largely one of function rather than substance. The ordinary and historical legal definitions are close in content — both describe obstinate, intolerant attachment to one's own views. The distinction worth noting for researchers is that the legal dictionaries deploy the term descriptively, to characterize a witness, party, or arbitrator as one whose credibility or impartiality may be questioned, not as a formal term of art carrying defined legal consequences. Modern common usage has broadened to include race, gender, and identity categories in ways wholly absent from the historical legal sources.
Common Confusion
BIGOT should not be confused with BIAS or PREJUDICE as those terms function in legal contexts. BIAS and PREJUDICE are operative legal concepts with procedural consequences — grounds for recusal, challenges for cause in jury selection, reversal on appeal. BIGOT, as used in historical legal sources, is a descriptive characterization without that procedural machinery attached. Modern researchers who encounter BIGOT in older opinions or treatises should read it as characterizing language, not as a term invoking a defined legal standard.
Why It Matters in Research
BIGOT is not a term of legal art in the operative sense. It appears in historical legal dictionaries as a descriptive or characterizing term, not as an element of a cause of action, a pleading category, or a jurisdictional concept. Researchers encountering it in primary sources should treat it as evaluative language about a person's reliability, partiality, or fitness — most likely surfacing in discussions of witness competency, juror qualification, or the temperament of arbitrators and ecclesiastical officers.
The source material provided for this entry reveals an important archival hazard: the Black's Law Dictionary entries appear to be fragmentary, with surrounding text from adjacent entries bleeding into the BIGOT definition. Researchers working with digitized or OCR-processed versions of historical legal dictionaries should be alert to this phenomenon, particularly in densely typeset volumes where entries run together without clear visual breaks. The Rapalje & Lawrence material reproduced here contains no substantive entry for BIGOT at all — the text is entirely from surrounding entries — which suggests either that the term was omitted from that dictionary or that the source extraction failed.
For researchers working in discrimination law, civil rights, or employment law contexts, the modern legal significance of bias and prejudice — concepts functionally related to what historical sources called bigotry — will be found not under BIGOT but under terms such as BIAS, PREJUDICE, DISCRIMINATION, and HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT. The historical legal dictionaries do not anticipate the statutory and constitutional frameworks that now govern bias-related claims.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) offer essentially identical, brief entries: "an obstinate person, or one that is wedded to an opinion, in matters of religion." Both editions treat the term as self-explanatory and do not elaborate on legal consequences or procedural relevance. The brevity is itself informative — the compilers regarded BIGOT as a general vocabulary word requiring only a gloss, not a term requiring doctrinal analysis.
Rapalje & Lawrence provides no usable entry for this term in the source material available. The surrounding entries (BETWEEN THE PARTIES, BEYOND SEA) confirm the term was either omitted or the extraction is defective.
Webster's 1913 is more detailed than any of the legal dictionaries on this term, which itself signals that BIGOT was not regarded by legal lexicographers as carrying specialized legal freight. Where the lay dictionary offers more than the law dictionary, the researcher is likely dealing with a term borrowed from common usage rather than one developed within legal doctrine.
No historical legal dictionary in this corpus addresses bigotry in connection with race, national origin, or gender — categories that modern law treats as central to discrimination analysis.