Definition
Connivance is the secret or indirect consent of one person to the commission of an unlawful act by another — not by active participation, but by deliberate failure to see, oppose, or prevent the act. The term carries the sense of willful blindness: the person who connives knows what is happening and chooses to look away, with that conscious inaction constituting a form of consent.
The term has two primary applications in law:
1. GENERAL: Passive complicity in any wrongful act. A person who knows a tort or offense is being committed and deliberately refrains from opposing or preventing it may be held to have connived in it. The knowing inaction is treated as constructive consent rather than mere negligence.
2. DIVORCE LAW (historical): Connivance as a defense to a divorce action based on adultery. Where a husband or wife consented to, encouraged, or deliberately ignored the other spouse's adulterous conduct, the innocent-party fiction was destroyed, and connivance barred relief. Under this doctrine, a petitioner who placed their spouse in circumstances designed to produce adultery, or who stood aside knowingly while the offense occurred, could not then use that adultery as grounds for dissolution.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The process of conniving or conspiring.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Intentional failure or forbearance to discover a fault or wrongdoing; voluntary oversight; passive consent or cooperation. Corrupt or guilty assent to wrongdoing, not involving actual participation in, but knowledge of, and failure to prevent or oppose it.
The modern common usage has drifted toward active conspiracy — "conniving" in everyday speech suggests scheming or plotting alongside another. The legal definition runs in precisely the opposite direction: connivance is passive, not active. It is the deliberate failure to see or intervene, not the active planning of wrongdoing. Webster's 1913 is actually closer to the legal meaning than contemporary usage. Researchers working with modern secondary sources should be alert to this shift: a source describing someone as a "conniver" today may imply active scheming, while the same word in a 19th-century legal document implies willful inaction.
Common Confusion
CONNIVANCE VS. COLLUSION
In divorce proceedings, collusion refers to an agreement between spouses to manufacture or falsify grounds for divorce. Connivance involves actual adulterous conduct that one spouse permitted or encouraged — the underlying act is real, not fabricated. Both defeat divorce petitions, but on different grounds: collusion attacks the integrity of the proceeding itself; connivance attacks the petitioner's standing as an aggrieved innocent party.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter connivance most heavily in three areas of the Law Mind corpus: divorce and domestic relations materials predating no-fault divorce reform, fraud and conspiracy doctrine, and general tort complicity.
In divorce-law materials, connivance was a live affirmative defense through most of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Sources under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 (England) and parallel American statutes treat connivance as an absolute bar to relief in adultery-based divorce actions. Researchers reading case law from this period should understand that connivance claims often turned on fine factual distinctions: did the husband merely fail to supervise, or did he deliberately create opportunity? Did he know or merely suspect? The threshold between passive negligence and actionable connivance was heavily litigated.
In fraud contexts, connivance shades into conspiracy. Rapalje & Lawrence explicitly note that connivance may take the form of fraud or conspiracy, which means historical sources may use the terms interchangeably or as points on a continuum. A researcher tracing liability for fraud or joint wrongdoing should not assume that connivance denotes something lesser than conspiracy — in some sources it is treated as equivalent.
The term largely disappears from active legal usage after the adoption of no-fault divorce statutes in the United States (completed across most jurisdictions by the 1980s) and equivalent reforms elsewhere. Post-reform sources will rarely use connivance as a term of art. Researchers should not expect modern case law to develop the doctrine further; historical materials are where the substance lives.
Historical Dictionary Support
The shelf sources are in strong agreement on the core definition. All five sources anchor connivance in the idea of deliberate inaction constituting consent: the Latin connivere (to wink the eye) is cited by both Burrill and Black's (2nd Ed.) as the conceptual root — looking away on purpose rather than failing to look at all.
Black's (both editions) defines connivance as "the secret or indirect consent or permission of one person to the commission of an unlawful or criminal act by another" and explicitly draws on Webster for the winking-at formulation. The second edition adds case citations (Oakland Bank v. Wilcox; State v. Gesell) and the additional phrase "corrupt consent of one party to the commission of the acts," reinforcing the moral character of the inaction.
Bouvier's provides the most analytically useful passage by distinguishing connivance from condonation: connivance "necessarily involves criminality on the part of the individual who connives," while condonation "may take place without imputing the slightest blame." This distinction is not drawn as sharply in Black's.
Anderson's emphasizes the divorce-law application specifically, noting the bar on subsequent divorce actions where a husband connived at his wife's conduct, with reference to the Matrimonial Causes Act pattern ("20 and 21 Vict., c. 85, and similar statutes in this country"). Anderson also frames connivance as "intentional failure or forbearance to see or actually know" — highlighting that the knowledge element must be willful, not merely constructive.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only source to note explicitly that connivance can shade into fraud or conspiracy, providing the most expansive view of the term's reach beyond domestic relations.
No shelf source addresses the modern drift of the word toward active scheming, which represents a gap researchers using contemporary secondary materials should bear in mind.
Jurisdictional Note
Connivance as a defense in divorce proceedings tracked the fault-based divorce regime. English law under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 codified it explicitly; American jurisdictions adopted parallel doctrines through case law and statute. The defense became functionally obsolete as no-fault divorce displaced fault-based grounds across U.S. jurisdictions in the 1970s–1980s. England similarly reformed divorce law in stages culminating in the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020. In jurisdictions that retain fault grounds, connivance may remain technically operative.