Definition
The party who makes a confirmation — that is, the grantor in a deed of confirmation. The confirmor conveys, ratifies, or strengthens a prior grant of an estate to the confirmee, typically to cure a defect in the original conveyance or to enlarge and secure the interest already held. The confirmor must hold a title or interest sufficient to support the confirmation; a confirmation can convey no greater right than the confirmor possesses.
Why It Matters in Research
CONFIRMOR is a narrow term of art in the law of real property conveyancing, appearing most often in older English and early American deed practice. Researchers encountering it in historical instruments or common law treatises should understand the relational pair: confirmor (grantor) and confirmee (grantee). The term surfaces almost exclusively in the context of deeds of confirmation — a conveyancing device used to validate defective titles or to give effect to a prior voidable grant. Because modern conveyancing practice has largely abandoned the formal deed of confirmation as a distinct instrument (with title insurance and statutory curative mechanisms serving similar functions), CONFIRMOR rarely appears in contemporary legal writing. In historical corpus sources, the term tends to cluster with other feudal and common law conveyancing vocabulary: feoffment, livery of seisin, release, quitclaim. Researchers using pre-twentieth-century legal materials should be alert to this vocabulary cluster. The term carries no jurisdictional variation of substance because it is definitional — it names a party role, not a legal standard.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are entirely consistent. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) defines CONFIRMOR as "the grantor in a deed of confirmation." Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers the equivalent: "he who makes a confirmation to another." There is no divergence among these authorities, which reflects the term's narrow and fixed function. None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the confirmor's required interest or capacity, though the common law rule — that a confirmation operates only on an existing estate and cannot create a new one — is foundational context that the dictionary entries assume rather than state. Researchers needing that substantive doctrine will find it in treatises on conveyancing rather than in the dictionary definitions themselves.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Deed of Confirmation; Conveyancing (Historical).