Definition
In law, favor means bias, partiality, or prejudice — a predisposition toward one party or outcome that compromises the impartiality required of a juror, judge, or other adjudicator. The term carries a negative valence in procedural contexts: to show favor is to fall short of the neutrality the legal system demands, regardless of whether the lean is sympathetic or hostile.
The concept appears most often in the law of challenges, where a juror may be challenged for favor — meaning that the juror harbors some partiality, relationship, or interest that prevents fair deliberation. Unlike a challenge for cause based on a disqualifying legal status, a challenge for favor rests on the subtler ground that the juror's state of mind cannot be trusted to remain neutral.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To look upon fondly; to prefer; to show beneficence toward; to treat gently or with special consideration.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Kind regard; propitious aspect; friendly disposition; the act of countenancing or regarding propitiously; support; promotion.
In ordinary English, favor is almost entirely positive — it describes warmth, goodwill, and helpful preference. In law, the term is diagnostic and cautionary. Legal favor does not mean goodwill shown to a deserving party; it means a skewed disposition that compromises neutral judgment. A juror who favors one party is not virtuous — they are disqualified.
Common Confusion
Favor and bias are used almost interchangeably in historical legal sources, and for most purposes the distinction is not meaningful. Some older authorities attempt a gradient: bias as a more deep-seated or structural inclination, favor as a more personal or relational one. This distinction does not survive consistently in practice, and modern courts treat the terms as functional equivalents in the challenge context.
Favor should also be distinguished from interest. A juror with a direct financial stake in the outcome is challengeable for interest or implied bias — a structural disqualification. Favor typically describes something more subjective: affection, prejudice, or relationship that falls short of a formal disqualifying interest but still threatens impartiality.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering favor in historical pleadings, trial records, or jury challenge proceedings should recognize it as a term of art pointing toward the law of challenge. When a historical source refers to a challenge to the polls for favor, or a challenge to the array for favor, the researcher is looking at a distinct procedural mechanism with its own doctrinal history — not a general reference to bias in the modern sense.
The maxim Favorabiliores rei, potius quam actores, habentur (the condition of the defendant is to be favored rather than the plaintiff) appears in several of the historical sources and represents a separate use of the concept: a principle of statutory and common law construction that ambiguities should be resolved in favor of the defendant. Researchers working on interpretive canons or the historical development of pro-defendant presumptions will find this maxim worth tracing. It appears in Justinian's Digest (50.17.125) and runs through English and American common law. It is distinct from the challenge-based meaning of favor but shares the root concept that the law should lean protective in appropriate circumstances.
The related maxim Favorabilia in lege sunt fiscus, dos, vita, libertas (things favorably considered in law are the treasury, dower, life, and liberty) reflects the historical practice of identifying categories of legal interest that courts and legislators were expected to construe broadly. Researchers in property, family law, or constitutional history may encounter this formulation in older treatises and should understand it as a canon of construction, not a substantive rule.
Discretionary administrative contexts — immigration, pardons, licensing — use "favorable exercise of discretion" as a term of art that connects to this root concept. A grant of relief requires not just eligibility but a favorable exercise of discretion, meaning the adjudicator must affirmatively prefer the applicant's outcome after weighing equities. This usage is structural to modern administrative law and distant from the bias-and-challenge meaning that dominates historical legal dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in close agreement on the core definition: Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Bouvier all define favor as bias, partiality, lenity, or prejudice, and all cross-reference the law of challenge. This uniformity is striking given that the sources otherwise diverge on many terms. The consistency reflects how settled this usage was in both English and American common law by the nineteenth century.
Burrill adds useful texture by tracing the Latin root (favor, from favere, to favor) — a reminder that the common and legal meanings share an etymology but diverged in valence. What in ordinary life meant warmth and goodwill became, in the courtroom, a marker of disqualification.
The historical sources do not address the administrative-law usage of favorable exercise of discretion, which is a twentieth-century development. Researchers should not expect historical dictionaries to illuminate that context; the modern administrative meaning must be traced through regulatory history and agency practice rather than through common law lexicography.
Anderson's entry is notably spare — a bare cross-reference to CHALLENGE and PREFER — which itself signals the extent to which favor functioned as a term of reference rather than a standalone doctrine in historical practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The challenge for favor as a distinct procedural category is more developed in English and early American common law than in modern American practice, where peremptory challenges and challenges for cause have largely absorbed the older taxonomy. Researchers in English legal history or early American courts will encounter the challenge for favor as a recognized form; researchers in contemporary American procedure should expect the concept to be folded into the broader challenge-for-cause framework.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Waivers — Overview, Discretionary Nature, and the Favorable Exercise Framework (The Law Mind Immigration Law Encyclopedia) — for the administrative-law context in which "favorable exercise of discretion" functions as a formal standard of decision distinct from mere eligibility.