Definition
Commission carries three distinct but related legal meanings, all rooted in the idea of delegated authority or entrusted action.
1. Authority or warrant. A formal written instrument — often letters patent or a document under seal — issued by a government, court, or superior official empowering named persons to perform specified acts, exercise jurisdiction, or discharge the duties of an office. Military officers, judges sitting by designation, and certain public officials receive their authority through a commission in this sense.
2. Agency and compensation. In contract and agency law, a commission is the authority granted to an agent to act on behalf of a principal — most commonly to buy, sell, or negotiate. By extension, the term designates the compensation the principal pays the agent for that service, typically calculated as a percentage of the transaction value. This is the dominant commercial meaning: a salesperson earns a commission; a broker charges a commission.
3. A body of persons. When a commission (in sense 1) is directed to a group rather than an individual, the group itself becomes "the commission" — a board or committee officially appointed and empowered to perform public acts or exercise public functions. Examples range from courts of commission in the historical common law to modern administrative agencies such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Election Commission, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To officially charge someone to do something; to place an order for a work; to put a vessel into active service.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A formal written warrant granting powers or privileges; the duty or employment entrusted to a person; the act of committing or perpetrating.
The everyday verb sense — "to commission an artist" or "to commission a warship" — captures only a fragment of the legal landscape. The legal noun encompasses authority documents, compensation structures, and institutional bodies. Researchers should also note that Webster's 1913 preserves a criminal-law usage ("commission of sin," "commission of a crime") meaning the act of perpetrating an offense — a sense absent from most legal dictionary definitions but present in indictments, statutes of limitations provisions, and insurance exclusion clauses throughout the Law Mind corpus.
Common Confusion
COMMISSION VS. COMMISSIONER
A commission is the body or the authority; a commissioner is an individual member or officer of that body. The distinction matters in administrative law, where the commission as an entity may have authority that individual commissioners acting alone do not.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Commission of assise: A historical English royal commission empowering judges to sit and try causes in a circuit; a precursor to the modern circuit court system.
Commission of bankruptcy: A formal authority issued to commissioners empowering them to administer proceedings against a bankrupt debtor under earlier English and American bankruptcy practice.
Commission del credere: An agency arrangement in which an agent guarantees the performance of contracts made on the principal's behalf, in exchange for a higher commission rate.
Commission (military): The formal warrant — issued by the head of state or the executive — that confers officer rank and authority in the armed forces.
Commission (regulatory body): A permanent or standing administrative agency constituted under statute to regulate a defined subject matter; examples include the Interstate Commerce Commission (established 1887), the Federal Election Commission, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Commission (compensation): Earnings calculated as a percentage of sales, transactions, or other performance metrics, governed in modern practice by wage and hour law, employment contracts, and payroll rules.
Why It Matters in Research
The multi-valence of this term is a significant trap in the Law Mind corpus. A search for "commission" will surface cases about unpaid sales compensation, constitutional challenges to administrative agency authority, military officer appointments, historical equity courts, and criminal statutes using "commission of an offense" — all in the same results set. Researchers must anchor context before reading.
For employment and compensation research: the commission-as-wages meaning is the operative one. Whether a commission has been "earned" — and thus becomes protected wages — turns on the terms of the underlying agreement and applicable state wage payment statutes. The Law Mind Employment & Labor Law Encyclopedia entry on Payroll Deductions, Tips, and Commissions addresses this directly.
For administrative law research: the commission-as-agency meaning dominates. The historical entry on the Interstate Commerce Commission in the Anderson's material reflects the late-nineteenth-century model of the expert regulatory commission — limited to fact-finding and rate oversight, with no independent legislative or judicial power. That model was contested from its inception and evolved substantially. Modern agencies styled as "commissions" (FEC, NRC, FTC, SEC) have varied mixes of rulemaking, adjudicatory, and enforcement authority. Do not assume structural uniformity across agencies because they share the label.
For historical source navigation: Burrill and Black's First Edition treat commission primarily in the warrant-and-authority sense, reflecting an era when the term's most legally significant use was the judicial or royal commission. The compensation meaning appears in Rapalje & Lawrence under agency but is treated as derivative. Bouvier's surviving entries in the corpus are fragmentary — one addresses an international declaration, another the ICC — and should not be read as a complete treatment. Researchers using nineteenth-century sources for the agency-compensation meaning should weight Rapalje & Lawrence and Anderson's over Bouvier's for this purpose.
The criminal law phrase "commission of an offense" appears throughout the corpus as a term of art fixing temporal reference points: statutes of limitations run from the commission of the act, not discovery; insurance exclusions apply to acts of commission; sentencing enhancements attach to certain commissions. This usage does not appear in most dictionary headwords for "commission" but is pervasive in practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
The shelf sources converge on the warrant-and-authority core. Burrill's definition — "a warrant or authority in writing and under seal... empowering those to whom it is directed to perform certain acts, or to exercise a certain jurisdiction" — is the most precise formulation and aligns with Black's First and Second Editions. Burrill notes the equivalence to the Roman law delegatio, which provides useful comparative grounding for civil law jurisdictions.
Rapalje & Lawrence extends the analysis into agency and compensation most fully among the shelf sources, defining commission in the contracts-and-agency context as "an authority to an agent to enter into a contract, especially one for the sale or purchase of goods," and expressly noting that the same word comes to denote the agent's remuneration. This derivation — authority begetting compensation — explains why modern employment law uses a single term for two conceptually distinct things (the right to act and the payment for acting).
Black's Law Dictionary, both editions, adds the body-of-persons meaning explicitly and gives "commission of assise" as the paradigm example. The Second Edition's treatment of the military commissary commissioner and ecclesiastical commission officer reflects the range of formal warrant-based delegation in late-nineteenth-century law.
Anderson's surviving excerpt addresses the Interstate Commerce Commission in the context of railroad rate regulation — useful for administrative law history but not a general definition. Bouvier's surviving corpus entries are similarly particular rather than general. Neither source should be treated as representative of these authors' full treatment of the term.
All sources are silent on what modern employment and wage-and-hour law has elaborated extensively: when a commission is "earned," how draw-against-commission arrangements work, and what recoupment of advances is permissible. These questions are governed by statutory and case law developed after the historical dictionaries were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
The compensation meaning of commission is heavily regulated at the state level. Whether a commission is a "wage" protected by state wage payment acts, when it vests, and whether charge-back provisions are enforceable vary significantly by jurisdiction. Federal law (Fair Labor Standards Act) establishes a partial exemption from overtime requirements for certain commission-based retail employees but does not preempt state wage rules. Researchers should not assume uniform treatment across states.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Payroll Deductions, Tips, and Commissions — The Law Mind Employment & Labor Law Encyclopedia
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Radiation Safety — The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) — Structure, Authority, and Enforcement — The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia