Definition
A council of conciliation is a joint labor-management body, composed of equal numbers of employers (masters) and workers, authorized to hear and resolve disputes arising out of the terms and conditions of employment in a particular trade. The council operates by mutual submission — both parties must agree to bring the question before it — and its authority extends to hearing and determining disputes arising from the specific trade or employment for which it was constituted.
The term is most closely associated with the English statutory framework established by the Conciliation Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vict. c. 105), which empowered the Crown to grant licenses for the formation of these bodies. In modern usage, the concept survives in the broader category of labor arbitration and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, though the term itself has largely passed out of contemporary legal vocabulary.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Council" means a body of persons assembled for deliberation or advice; "conciliation" means the act of gaining goodwill or resolving a dispute by a friendly approach.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Council" — a body of men elected or appointed to constitute an advisory or legislative assembly; "conciliation" — the act of conciliating; the state of being conciliated.
The ordinary English sense suggests a broadly deliberative body seeking goodwill. The legal meaning is narrower and more procedural: a council of conciliation is a constituted tribunal with adjudicative authority over a defined class of disputes, not merely an informal assembly seeking compromise. Its power to "hear and determine" places it closer to arbitration than to mediation in the modern sense.
Common Confusion
Conciliation and arbitration are often used interchangeably in historical sources, and the enabling statute itself pairs them: "councils of conciliation and arbitration." The distinction matters for research. Conciliation traditionally describes a process in which a third party (or joint body) facilitates agreement between disputing parties; arbitration involves a binding determination by a neutral. The council of conciliation, as described in the 1867 Act, blurs this line — it is a joint body with the power to determine disputes, suggesting a hybrid function. Researchers encountering the phrase in historical materials should not assume it maps cleanly onto modern conciliation (non-binding) or arbitration (binding).
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost entirely historical in the Law Mind corpus. Researchers are unlikely to encounter it in modern U.S. materials. Key navigational points:
First, the term appears in English legal sources tied to a specific statutory moment — the Conciliation Act 1867 — and its appearance in American legal dictionaries reflects the influence of English labor law on American legal thought in the late nineteenth century, not a parallel American statutory structure.
Second, the entries in all three source dictionaries are textually nearly identical, suggesting that later dictionaries copied the Black's formulation without independent development. This convergence means the definitions carry no additional interpretive weight from repetition.
Third, for researchers tracing the history of American labor dispute resolution, the council of conciliation is an ancestor concept. American developments — including state arbitration boards, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and modern labor arbitration clauses in collective bargaining agreements — draw on this tradition while departing substantially from the English joint-council model.
Fourth, the voluntary submission requirement is significant. The council had no power to compel parties to appear; both masters and workmen had to agree to submit a dispute. This bilateral consent structure distinguishes it from later statutory arbitration schemes and from administrative adjudication.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Black's (2nd Ed.) — reproduce substantially the same definition, each tracking the language of the Conciliation Act 1867 closely. None of the three entries develops the concept beyond its English statutory origin, and all three appear to truncate at the same point in the statutory description ("arising out of or with respect to the particul[ar trade]"), suggesting a shared source text.
Rapalje & Lawrence, a dictionary oriented toward practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic, includes the entry without supplementing it with American analogues, which is itself informative: as of its publication, no settled American legal term had displaced or absorbed the English concept. The historical dictionaries are silent on enforcement mechanisms, the effect of a council's determination, or whether its decisions carried any binding or preclusive force — gaps that would matter in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The council of conciliation as a formal legal institution is English in origin. The United States developed separate statutory frameworks for labor dispute resolution, including state-level boards and, at the federal level, the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Researchers working in American jurisdictions should treat this term as a comparative or historical reference point rather than operative law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See also: Social Security Appeals — Reconsideration, ALJ Hearing, Appeals Council, and Judicial Review (The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia, admin_104) — for the modern American administrative hearing and appeals structure, which represents a distinct but conceptually related tradition of structured adjudication outside the ordinary courts.