Definition
A contemner is a person who has committed contempt of court — that is, one who has disobeyed a court order, disrupted judicial proceedings, or otherwise acted in defiance of the court's authority. The term functions as a status label: it identifies the individual against whom contempt proceedings have been brought or upon whom a contempt finding has been entered.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who contemns, who displays contempt towards another.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who contemns; a despiser; a scorner. "Contemners of the gods."
The ordinary English word carries a broad, attitudinal meaning — anyone who holds something in disdain or scorn. The legal term is narrower and procedural: it refers specifically to a person found or charged with contempt of court, not merely someone with a dismissive attitude toward judicial authority. A party who privately disrespects a judge is not a contemner in the legal sense; a party who violates an injunction is.
Common Confusion
Contemner is sometimes loosely interchanged with contemnor, which is an alternative spelling of the same term — both are accepted, and neither carries a distinct legal meaning. Researchers should search both spellings in historical sources, as usage varies by jurisdiction and era. The term should not be confused with contemnee, which does not appear as a recognized legal term, or with defendant, which describes a party's procedural posture rather than a finding of disobedience.
Why It Matters in Research
Contemner is a narrow term of art that appears almost exclusively in the context of contempt proceedings — civil or criminal. Its presence in a historical document signals that the relevant court has reached (or is approaching) a contempt determination, which makes it a useful search anchor when tracing how a case resolved.
Spelling variation is a genuine research trap. Historical reporters and court records use both contemner and contemnor, and neither form dominates consistently across jurisdictions or time periods. Any corpus search for contempt-related parties should run both spellings.
The term does not distinguish between civil and criminal contempt. A contemner may be someone jailed to coerce compliance (civil contempt) or someone punished for a completed act of defiance (criminal contempt). The procedural distinction matters enormously for understanding what remedies were available and what rights the individual held, but the label contemner alone does not resolve it. Researchers must look to the surrounding procedural context.
In older equity practice, the term appeared frequently in chancery proceedings, where courts had broad injunctive powers and regularly held parties in contempt for violating decrees. The chancery heritage means that contemner appears more densely in equity reporters than in common law reporters, a distribution that affects where in the corpus the term clusters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary define contemner identically and minimally: one who has committed contempt of court. The second edition adds a single case citation — Wyatt v. People, 17 Colo. 252, 28 Pac. 961 — which confirms the term's use in American appellate practice but offers no elaboration on its scope. The definitions are entirely consistent across editions, reflecting the term's semantic stability: it has never meant anything other than this in legal usage. Neither edition addresses the civil/criminal contempt distinction or the spelling variation, leaving researchers to work those questions out from context.
Webster's 1913 captures the older, broader English sense — the scorner, the despiser — which is the root meaning but not the legal one. The historical dictionary entries show no evolution in legal meaning; the term entered legal usage already narrowed to its procedural application and has remained there.