Definition
"During good pleasure." A Latin tenure phrase describing an office or appointment held at the will of the appointing authority — that is, terminable at any time without cause. The holder of such an office has no protected term and serves only so long as the grantor of the office is pleased to continue the appointment.
The phrase is most closely associated with the historical tenure of English judges in the superior courts, who originally held their commissions durante beneplacito — at the pleasure of the Crown. This meant the monarch could remove a judge without stated reason at any time. The contrast term is durante bona vita (for life) or quamdiu se bene gesserint (during good behavior), the latter of which eventually replaced durante beneplacito as the standard of judicial tenure following the Act of Settlement 1701.
Common Confusion
Durante beneplacito is frequently paired with or confused against durante bona vita and quamdiu se bene gesserint. These are distinct standards. Durante beneplacito is pure at-will tenure — no cause required for removal. Quamdiu se bene gesserint is conditional tenure — the holder keeps the office unless they misbehave. During the seventeenth century, the shift from the former to the latter for English judges was a constitutional milestone. Researchers encountering either phrase in historical sources should determine precisely which standard applied at the date of the document in question, as the two phrases reflect fundamentally different relationships between the Crown and the judiciary.
Durante minore aetate (during minority) appears in the same Latin-phrase family and in closely adjacent sections of Blackstone. It is unrelated in substance — it concerns letters of administration granted during the infancy of an heir — but the proximity in reference works has occasionally caused researchers to conflate entries.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this term is constitutional-historical rather than transactional. It marks a specific, dateable inflection point in English judicial independence. Sources dated before 1701 that describe superior court judges will often reflect durante beneplacito tenure; sources after the Act of Settlement reflect quamdiu se bene gesserint tenure. A researcher reading Blackstone's Commentaries (Book 1, ch. 7) or Stephen's Commentaries in their original context needs to know which regime is being described to correctly understand the passage.
In American legal history, the phrase surfaces in debates about the independence of colonial and early federal judges. The question of whether judges held at executive pleasure or during good behavior was live and contested in the founding period. The durante beneplacito model was associated with Crown overreach; rejection of it informed Article III's good-behavior tenure clause for federal judges. Researchers working in early American constitutional history, judicial tenure debates, or colonial grievance documents will encounter this phrase and its conceptual shadow.
For administrative law researchers, the underlying concept — an officer serving at the pleasure of an appointing authority — remains operationally significant even where the Latin phrase itself has dropped from use. Modern "at-will" executive appointments are the functional descendants of durante beneplacito tenure. Recognizing the historical phrase helps connect contemporary doctrine to its common law ancestry.
Trap for researchers: Burrill's entry pairs this phrase with durante minore aetate in the same block of text. Cross-referencing to Blackstone Book 2 or Coke for the latter term will lead away from judicial tenure doctrine entirely, into administration law for infant heirs. Verify which phrase is operative before following the citation trail.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the core entry, defining the phrase as "during good pleasure" and identifying it as the tenure by which English superior court judges formerly held their commissions. The entry is brief and citation-dependent, pointing to Blackstone's Commentaries (1 Bl. Com. 267, 342) and Stephen's Commentaries (2 Steph. Com. 492) for substantive elaboration.
Blackstone's own treatment is more instructive. He frames the shift from durante beneplacito to quamdiu se bene gesserint as a landmark of judicial liberty, marking the judges' independence from direct royal control as essential to the rule of law. Burrill's entry captures the phrase but compresses the constitutional significance Blackstone supplies.
Historical dictionaries generally treat durante beneplacito as a settled, closed category — a historical tenure form rather than a living doctrine. This is accurate for English law post-1701 but understates the phrase's continued relevance as a conceptual reference point in American constitutional argument through at least the early nineteenth century.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase applies primarily in English common law history and in the constitutional law of jurisdictions derived from it. In the United States, Article III federal judges hold during good behavior — the opposing model — but the durante beneplacito concept remains relevant when analyzing the tenure of executive-branch officers who serve at presidential pleasure. State judicial tenure varies considerably; some states employ elected judges on fixed terms, which is neither model precisely.