BOYCOTT - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

BOYCOTTAuthored

The Law Mind • 1326 words

Definition

A boycott is a concerted refusal to engage in commercial or social dealings with a person, business, or organization, typically undertaken to pressure that target into changing conduct or to cause economic injury. The term encompasses both the act of refusal and the organized effort to induce others to refuse as well.

In legal contexts, boycotts appear across several distinct bodies of law:

1. Labor law: A boycott by workers or unions against an employer — refusing to purchase, handle, or work with the employer's goods or services — as a form of collective economic pressure.

2. Antitrust and trade regulation: A concerted refusal to deal among competitors or buyers, used to exclude a rival from a market or coerce compliance with industry terms. This form is frequently treated as a per se violation of federal antitrust law.

3. Criminal/tort law (historical): Early American and English law treated organized boycotts as criminal conspiracies or tortious combinations when they used coercion, threats, or intimidation to injure another's business.

4. Political and consumer boycotts: Organized public campaigns urging abstention from purchasing a company's goods or services to protest its policies. These generally receive constitutional protection as expressive conduct under the First Amendment.

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Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of boycotting — combining against a person or entity to withhold commercial or social relations.

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To combine against a landlord, tradesman, employer, or other person to withhold social or business relations and to deter others from holding such relations.

The common and legal meanings share the same core conduct, but the legal meaning is not uniform. Whether a boycott is protected, tortious, criminal, or illegal under antitrust law depends entirely on who is doing it, against whom, for what purpose, and by what means. The common usage implies a morally neutral or even admirable form of protest. Legal usage carries no such default: the same act may be constitutionally protected in one context and a per se antitrust violation in another.

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Common Confusion

PRIMARY/SECONDARY BOYCOTT: A primary boycott targets the employer or business directly involved in a dispute. A secondary boycott targets a neutral third party — a supplier, customer, or business associate of the primary target — to amplify economic pressure. This distinction is critical in labor law: secondary boycotts by unions are broadly prohibited under the Labor Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley Act). Historical sources do not observe this distinction, because the statutory framework that created it did not exist when most historical dictionaries were compiled.

GROUP BOYCOTT (ANTITRUST) vs. LABOR BOYCOTT: A group boycott in antitrust law is a horizontal agreement among competitors to refuse to deal with another party. A labor boycott is a union's refusal to handle or purchase a struck employer's goods. The legal analysis, governing law, and permissible defenses are entirely different. Researchers conflating these two uses will find sources talking past each other.

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Recognized Forms

/SUBTYPES

Primary boycott: Refusal by workers, union members, or consumers to patronize or deal with the direct target of a dispute.

Secondary boycott: Pressure directed at third parties — neutrals who do business with the primary target — to induce them to stop dealing with that target. Largely prohibited in the union context by federal statute.

Group boycott (concerted refusal to deal): An antitrust concept involving horizontal competitors agreeing to exclude a rival or supplier. Treated as per se illegal in classic form under Sherman Act analysis, though modern courts apply rule-of-reason analysis in some circumstances.

Consumer / political boycott: A public campaign urging individuals not to purchase goods or services from a target. Generally protected as expressive conduct; the Supreme Court addressed the constitutional dimensions of organized political boycotts in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982).

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Why It Matters in Research

The word "boycott" is deceptively stable across centuries of legal sources while the underlying legal analysis has transformed almost entirely. Researchers must identify which legal regime governs the boycott at issue before the sources become useful.

Historical sources (pre-1935) treat virtually all organized boycotts as presumptively criminal conspiracies or tortious combinations. This reflects the common-law conspiracy framework dominant before labor law was federalized. Cases from this era are not reliable guides to modern labor or antitrust law and should not be cited for propositions about the legality of boycotts today.

The New Deal era fundamentally changed the landscape. The Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935) displaced much of the criminal conspiracy framework for labor boycotts and created affirmative protections for collective action. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) then drew the primary/secondary distinction and prohibited secondary boycotts by unions. None of this appears in Bouvier, the first edition of Black's, or the second edition.

In antitrust research, the per se treatment of group boycotts — influential for decades following early Sherman Act cases — has been substantially qualified. Modern courts are more likely to apply rule-of-reason analysis unless the boycott involves naked horizontal restraint among competitors with market power. Sources from the mid-twentieth century may overstate the per se rule's reach.

In constitutional research, the political/consumer boycott is analytically separate from both labor and antitrust boycotts. Claiborne Hardware is the controlling reference point, but it post-dates all historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus.

The corpus connection between boycott and conspiracy is the most important navigational point: nearly every historical source defines boycott primarily through the lens of criminal conspiracy. To understand why, researchers should trace the labor conspiracy cases, not the boycott entries themselves.

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Historical Dictionary Support

All three historical sources — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Bouvier's — define boycott through the criminal conspiracy framework. The formulations are nearly identical: a combination or confederation designed to injure another's business by preventing customers from dealing with them through threats, intimidation, or other forcible means.

Bouvier adds the term's origin, noting that it derives from an incident involving Captain Boycott, an English land agent in Ireland who became the target of organized social and economic ostracism in 1880. This etymological note is accurate and the historical context is useful: the term was borrowed from a proper name and entered legal usage almost immediately, reflecting how quickly organized labor conflict escalated in both England and the United States in the late nineteenth century.

The Virginia Law Journal citation appearing across sources (11 Va. Law J. 329) was the early influential treatment that shaped both Bouvier's and Black's definitions — researchers encountering this citation should understand it reflects the criminal conspiracy view of boycotts, not any statutory or constitutional framework.

What the historical sources uniformly miss: the labor law revolution of the 1930s and 1940s, the primary/secondary distinction, the antitrust group boycott doctrine, and the constitutional protection of expressive boycotts. They also reflect no awareness that the legality of a boycott might depend on purpose or target rather than on the mere fact of organized collective pressure.

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Jurisdictional Note

Federal law governs labor boycotts where the employer's business affects interstate commerce, making state law largely preempted in that context. Antitrust group boycotts are primarily analyzed under federal Sherman Act doctrine, though state antitrust statutes may apply to purely intrastate conduct. Consumer and political boycotts are subject to First Amendment protection regardless of jurisdiction, but state tort law (interference with business relations) may still reach boycotts that cross into unprotected coercive conduct.

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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Labor Law (for primary/secondary boycott doctrine and federal statutory framework); Antitrust and Trade Regulation (for group boycott and concerted refusal to deal analysis).

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BOYCOTTmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

In criminal law. A con- spiracy formed and intended directly or in- directly to prevent the carrying on of any lawful business, or to injure the business of any one by wrongfully preventing those who would be customers from buying anything from or employing the representatives of said business, by threats, intimidation, or other forcible means. 11 Va. Law J. 329.

BOYCOTTmain

Bouvier's Law Dictionary • 1928

A confederation, gener ally secret, of many persons, whose intent is to injure another by preventing any and all persons from doing business with him through fear of incurring the displeasure, persecution, and vengeance of the conspir- ators. 84 Va. 940; 11 Va. Law Jour. 329. The term seems to have been derived from an incident that occurred in Ireland. Captain Boycott, an Englishman, who was agent of Lord Earne and a farmer of Lough Mask, served notices upon the lord's tenants, and they in turn, with the surrounding popu- lation, resolved to have nothing to do with him, and, as far as they could prevent it, not to allow any one else to have. His life appeared to be in danger, and he had to claim police protection. His servants fed from him, and the awful sentence of excom- munication could hardly have rendered him more helplessly alone for a time. No one would work for him, and no one would supply him with food. He and his wife were compelled to work in their own fields with the shadows of armed constabulary ever at their heels; Justin MacCarthy's "England under Gladstone." See 35 Alb. L. Jour. 348; 18 L. R. Ir. 430. A combination to cause a loss to one per- son by coercing others, against their will, to withdraw from him their beneficial business intercourse, through threats that, unless those others do so, they will cause similar loss to them. Such a combination is unlawful. 15 Q. B. D. 476; 23 Q. B. D. 598; [1892] Α. C. 25; [1893] 1 Q. B. 715; 106 Mass. 1; 32 N. J. L. 151; 55 Conn. 46; 147 Mass. 212; 77 Md. 396; 45 Fed. Rep. 135; 54 Fed. Rep. 730; 30 Atl. Rep. (N. J.) 891. A boycott is not unlawful, unless at- tended with some act in itself illegal; 54 Minn. 223; 38 Pac. Rep. (Oreg.) 547. Com- binations, in the nature of boycotts, which have been held to be unlawful conspiracies are:-to compel a member of a labor union to pay a fine assessed against him for work- ing in a mill with steam machinery by pre- venting his obtaining employment; 5 Cox, C. C. 162; to obstruct an employer in the conduct of his business: 64 Mich. 252; 10 Cox, C. C. 592; to coerce an employer to con- duct his business with reference to appren- tices and delinquent members according to the demand of the union, by injuring his business through notices to customers and material men that dealings with him would be followed by similar measures against them; 23 Wkly. L. B. (Ohio) 48; to pre- vent the employment of a granite cutter declared by a labor union to be a "scab"; 59 Vt. 273; 32 N. J. L. 151; to compel an employer to discharge non-union men; 55 Ct. 46; 4 N. Y. Crim. Rep. 403; id. 429; 5 id. 509; to induce employés to leave their employment and prevent others from enter- ing it; 107 Mass. 555; to induce workmen to quit in a body to enforce the demands of a labor union; 30 Fed. Rep. 48; parading in front of a factory with banners to induce workmen to keep away; 147 Mass. 212; gathering around a place of business and following employés to and from work, and collecting about their boarding-places with threats, intimidation, and ridicule; 152 Pa. 595. Such besetting of works is called picketting. Boycotts may be restrained by injunction; 26 Fed. Rep. 803; a violation of which is punishable as a contempt; 64 Fed. Rep. 724; 158 U. S. 564. In several states there are statutes on the subject, some of them merely declaratory of the com- mon law, and others, more drastic, which extend the doctrine to new acts and circumstances; Wis. Laws, 1887, 287; 1895, 240; R. S. 446 a; R. I. 242, 40; Me. R. S. 1883, 126, 18; N. Y. P. C. 168; Minn. 6423; Ill. 38, 73; Tenn. 1887,208, 1; Ga. Code § 4498; Тех. Р. С. 279, 289, 295, and 304; La. 1894, 149; Minn. 6423; Mon. Р. С. 822; N. J. R. S. p. 261, § 191; p. 1296, § 9; and others cited in Stimson's Handbook of Labor Law. See, generally, Moses, Strikes; Stimson's Handbook of Labor Law in the U. S.;

BOYCOTTmain

Bouvier's Law Dictionary • 1928

See SECONDARY CONVEYANCES, or derivative conveyances, are those which presuppose some other conveyance prece- dent, and only serve to enlarge, confirm, alter, restrain, restore, or transfer the in- terest granted by such original convey- ance. 2 Sharsw. Bla. Com. 234*.

BOYCOTTv.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

To combine against (a landlord, tradesman, employer, or other person), to withhold social or business relations from him, and to deter others from holding such relations; to subject to a boycott.

BOYCOTTn.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

The process, fact, or pressure of boycotting; a combining to withhold or prevent dealing or social intercourse with a tradesman, employer, etc.; social and business interdiction for the purpose of coercion.

boycottnoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.

The act of boycotting.

boycottverb

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

To abstain, either as an individual or a group, from using, buying, or dealing with someone or some organization as an expression of protest.

Boycottname

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

A hamlet in Stowe parish, Buckinghamshire, England (OS grid ref SP6636). | A surname.

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