Definition
A champertor is a person who engages in champerty: one who finances or promotes another party's lawsuit at their own expense, having bargained in advance to receive a share of the proceeds if the litigation succeeds. The champertor has no independent interest in the dispute; their involvement is purely speculative and profit-driven. Historically treated as a criminal offender under English statute, the champertor was understood as a person who corrupted the legal process by introducing mercenary interests into litigation that was not their own.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "One guilty of champerty; one who purchases a suit, or the right of suing, and carries it on at his or her own expense, in order to obtain a share of the gain."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One guilty of champerty; one who purchases a suit, or the right of suing, and carries it on at his own expense, in order to obtain a share of the gain."
The common and legal definitions are unusually close here, but the gap that matters is one of legal consequence: ordinary usage describes what a champertor does; the legal definition historically carried criminal liability. Calling someone a champertor in a legal source meant an indictable offender, not merely a participant in a questionable financial arrangement.
Common Confusion
Champertor and maintainer are related but distinct roles. A maintainer assists another's litigation with money or support without taking a share of the proceeds. A champertor does the same but bargains for a cut of the outcome. All champertors are maintainers in the broad sense, but not all maintainers are champertors. A third figure, the barrator, stirs up groundless suits generally. The three terms appear together in historical sources and statutes, and researchers reading older treatises and pleadings must distinguish them carefully. Modern sources frequently collapse these distinctions or use "champerty" loosely to cover conduct that older law would have called mere maintenance.
Why It Matters in Research
Champertor is an agent noun — it names the person, while champerty names the offense. Researchers searching historical sources will encounter both forms. Legal dictionaries and treatises from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consistently define champertor by reference to the underlying crime, which means understanding the term requires first locating and understanding champerty.
The criminal dimension is the primary research trap. Champerty and its actors were criminally prosecutable under English law by statute as early as the reign of Edward I (33 Edw. I, st. 2), and later under 28 Edw. I and related statutes. American jurisdictions inherited this framework but applied it unevenly. By the mid-twentieth century, most American states had abolished champerty as a crime while retaining it as a basis for voiding contracts. A researcher encountering champertor in a nineteenth-century American case is likely reading a criminal law context; the same researcher in a twenty-first-century source is almost certainly reading contract invalidity doctrine. The word looks the same; the legal world around it has shifted substantially.
The modern third-party litigation funding industry has revived interest in champerty doctrine without reviving the term champertor. Contemporary scholarship and case law discuss "funders," "investors," and "litigation finance," not champertors. A corpus researcher tracing the conceptual history of third-party litigation finance must therefore bridge a terminological gap between historical sources using champertor and modern sources that have abandoned the word entirely.
Jurisdictional variation in the survival of champerty doctrine also affects how this term appears. In jurisdictions where champerty remains a live defense to contract enforcement, champertor may still appear in pleadings and opinions. In jurisdictions where the doctrine is abrogated, the term is historical only.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary define champertor in identical or near-identical terms, all tracing directly to 33 Edw. I, st. 2. The consistency is notable: all three sources reproduce essentially the same statutory formula without elaboration. This reflects the term's character as a creature of statute — the historical dictionaries are essentially paraphrasing the medieval English enactment rather than synthesizing common law development.
Bouvier adds parenthetically the Latin root of champerty itself (campum partire, to divide the land), which is contextually useful because it underscores that the original wrong was conceived in terms of dividing land recovered in litigation — a reflection of the agrarian property disputes that made champerty a serious concern in medieval England. Neither Black's edition engages with this etymology or with the question of how the doctrine translated to non-land disputes, which became the more contested terrain in American courts.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any treatment of the criminal procedure by which champertors were actually prosecuted, the defenses available, or the trajectory of the doctrine in American jurisdictions. Researchers should not treat these definitions as a complete picture of how champertor was operationalized in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
England abolished champerty and maintenance as crimes in 1967 (Criminal Law Act 1967), though the underlying conduct may still affect contract enforceability in some contexts. In the United States, abolition has been piecemeal and varies by state; some jurisdictions retain champerty as a contract defense, others have eliminated the doctrine entirely. Researchers working across jurisdictions should not assume that the criminal label attached to champertor in historical sources reflects current law anywhere.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Champerty and Maintenance