Definition
An officer attached to a court of chancery whose function was to take testimony from witnesses outside of open court. The examiner would personally interrogate witnesses under oath, reduce their answers to written form, and certify the resulting depositions to the court for use at the hearing of the cause. Because equity proceedings historically did not involve live witness testimony before the chancellor in the manner of common law jury trials, the examiner served as the essential mechanism through which testimonial evidence entered the equity record.
The office was a formal appointment within the chancery court structure, not an ad hoc delegation. Examiners operated under established procedural rules governing how examinations were to be conducted, transcribed, and returned to the court.
Common Confusion
EXAMINER IN CHANCERY vs. MASTER IN CHANCERY: These offices are frequently confused because both operated outside of open court and both generated written records for the chancellor's use. The distinction is functional: the master in chancery held broader authority, including the power to hear arguments, take accounts, and make findings on referred matters. The examiner's role was limited to the receipt of testimony. In practice, some courts combined or blurred these functions, and historical sources are not always precise in their use of the titles.
EXAMINER IN CHANCERY vs. COMMISSIONER: Some American equity courts used "commissioner" to describe an officer performing functions identical or similar to those of an examiner in chancery. The titles may be interchangeable in a given jurisdiction's practice, or may describe distinct offices. Context and jurisdiction-specific practice materials are required to determine which applies.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term that belongs almost entirely to the historical equity practice of England and, to a lesser degree, the equity courts of the American states before the merger of law and equity. Researchers encountering this term in primary sources should understand that it signals a procedural posture — testimony being taken out of court, in writing, for later reading into the record — that no longer exists in its original form in modern American practice.
The procedural world this term inhabits dissolved in the United States with the adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, which merged law and equity and replaced the written examination system with modern deposition practice. State-level equity courts followed on varying timelines. A researcher reading nineteenth-century chancery pleadings, equity practice manuals, or appellate opinions in equity cases will encounter frequent references to examinations taken before an examiner, cross-examinations before the examiner, and disputes about the propriety of the examiner's conduct. Understanding that the examiner was a neutral officer of the court — not a party-affiliated figure — is essential to interpreting those records correctly.
Do not conflate the examiner in chancery with a referee, a master in chancery, or a commissioner. These are related but distinct roles with different functions and different degrees of judicial authority. The master in chancery held broader quasi-judicial powers; the examiner's function was narrower and primarily testimonial.
Researchers working in equity court archives should also be aware that examination transcripts — the physical written records produced by the examiner — are often preserved separately from the main case file and may require independent retrieval. These documents can be rich primary sources for social and legal historians.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Burrill's Law Dictionary give nearly identical definitions, both tracing the core formulation to Cowell. Burrill adds a reference to Daniell's Chancery Practice, which was the leading English treatise on chancery procedure and remains a standard reference for historical equity research. The convergence of these two sources on essentially the same text reflects that this was a settled, well-understood office with a fixed definition — there was no meaningful doctrinal controversy about what an examiner in chancery was.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the American variation. Chancery practice in the states diverged considerably from the English model, and not all equity courts used the term "examiner in chancery" in the same way or maintained a dedicated officer by that name. Some American equity courts assigned examination duties to commissioners or masters rather than maintaining a distinct examiner's office. Researchers should not assume that a reference to an "examiner" in an American equity proceeding maps perfectly onto the English institutional model described by Cowell and Daniell.
Jurisdictional Note
The office of examiner in chancery was a creature of English equity practice and was adopted unevenly across American jurisdictions. States with dedicated equity courts — notably Delaware, New Jersey, and South Carolina — developed their own examiner or commissioner systems. Many other states never formalized the office and assigned equivalent functions to masters or commissioners. Modern research into any specific American jurisdiction requires consulting that jurisdiction's historical equity rules and practice manuals rather than relying on the English model.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
criminal_182: Confrontation Clause — Right to Cross-Examination (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia) [for background on the constitutional values underlying live testimony versus written depositions]