Definition
Champertors are persons who improperly fund, promote, or carry on another party's lawsuit — typically in exchange for a share of the proceeds or property in dispute. The term is the plural of champertor, designating the individual actor in the offense of champerty. A champertor does not merely encourage litigation from the sidelines; they actively move suits or cause suits to be moved, bearing the costs of the litigation themselves in anticipation of receiving a portion of whatever land or gain results from a successful outcome.
The term is inseparable from its parent concept. Where champerty is the offense, champertors are the offenders.
Common Confusion
CHAMPERTORS vs. MAINTAINERS: These terms are related but distinct. Maintainers are persons who unlawfully support another's litigation (financially or otherwise) without a stake in the outcome. Champertors go further — they have a direct financial interest, specifically a bargained-for share of the recovery or disputed property. All champertors engage in a form of maintenance, but not all maintainers are champertors. Historical sources sometimes use the terms loosely, and researchers should not assume equivalence when encountering either word in older materials.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in historical legal materials. Champertors — as a specific noun — was a term of art in English common law and early American cases, rooted in the Statute of Westminster I (1275) and the specific statute cited by Rapalje & Lawrence, 33 Edward I, c. 2 (1305). Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century American case law, particularly in Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, and New York (all jurisdictions cited in Rapalje & Lawrence), will encounter the term in reported decisions where the validity of contingency fee agreements or litigation-financing arrangements was contested.
The critical research trap is anachronism. Modern contingency fee agreements, standard practice in American litigation, would have constituted champerty — and their promoters champertors — under the traditional common law rule. The gradual erosion of champerty doctrine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries means that a nineteenth-century decision condemning a champertor may reflect a legal standard that no longer exists in that jurisdiction. Researchers should not read these cases as statements of current law without checking whether the champerty doctrine has been modified or abolished.
The term also surfaces in equity proceedings and in challenges to the enforceability of contracts. When a party sought to void an agreement on grounds that it was champertous, the counterparty was implicitly or explicitly cast as a champertor. Understanding the noun helps researchers recognize the procedural posture of these disputes.
Corpus connections: Entries and cases touching champertors will often cluster around discussions of attorney ethics, assignment of choses in action, litigation funding, and the enforceability of fee agreements. The conceptual lineage runs forward to modern debates over third-party litigation financing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define champertors by function — persons who "move pleas or suits, or cause them to be moved, either by their own procurement, or by others, and sue them at their proper costs, in order to have part of the land in variance, or part of the gain." This definition closely tracks the statutory language of 33 Edward I, c. 2, which is the definitional anchor for the term across common law jurisdictions. The reference to land is historically significant: champerty originated in a feudal context where the primary asset in dispute was real property, and early champertors were typically those who bankrolled litigation to carve out a portion of contested land. The later extension to "part of the gain" reflects the doctrine's expansion to cover personal property and money judgments.
The string of American citations provided by Rapalje & Lawrence — spanning Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, and New York — confirms that champertors was a live legal category in nineteenth-century American courts, not merely an English curiosity. The variation across jurisdictions in how strictly these courts applied the doctrine is itself a research finding: some states treated champerty as a criminal offense; others addressed it only through contract unenforceability.
No single historical dictionary source provides a comprehensive account of how the doctrine softened over time. That evolution is documented in case law rather than in the dictionaries, making Rapalje & Lawrence useful as a baseline definition but insufficient as a guide to the term's later trajectory.
Jurisdictional Note
Champerty and its associated term champertors were abolished or significantly limited in many American jurisdictions during the twentieth century. In some states the doctrine survives only as a basis for voiding contracts, not as a criminal offense. English law formally abolished criminal and tortious liability for champerty and maintenance in 1967. Researchers should verify the current status of champerty doctrine in the relevant jurisdiction before treating historical case law as controlling authority.