Definition
Feasance is the doing or performing of an act. In legal usage, it refers generally to the execution or performance of some action, whether that action is lawful, wrongful, or wholly omitted. The term rarely appears in modern legal practice as a standalone word; its significance lies almost entirely in its function as the shared root of three operative legal concepts — malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance — which together form a tripartite framework for classifying wrongful conduct, particularly in tort law and public officer liability.
In older usage, feasance also carried the meaning of making or creating a legal instrument, such as an indenture, release, or statute. This sense has fallen entirely out of modern usage.
A secondary form, gratuitous feasance, appears in bailment law to describe a voluntary service rendered without compensation — the defining characteristic of a bailment by mandate, where the bailee undertakes to perform an act for the bailor as a favor rather than under contract.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The performing of an act, especially out of one's duty."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a standalone entry for feasance, reflecting its status even then as primarily a legal or quasi-legal term of art rather than a word in general circulation.
The Wiktionary definition is serviceable but undersells the term's legal function. In law, feasance is almost never encountered alone. Its importance is structural: it names the action-element that the three compound terms (mal-, mis-, non-) then qualify by character or absence. A researcher who encounters "feasance" in an older legal text or treatise should read it as a building block, not a standalone claim.
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Common Confusion
Feasance, misfeasance, and malfeasance are sometimes used interchangeably in non-legal writing and even in casual legal commentary. They are not synonymous. Malfeasance is the doing of a wrongful or unlawful act, particularly one a person had no right to do at all. Misfeasance is the improper performance of an otherwise lawful act. Nonfeasance is the failure to act when a duty to act exists. Feasance itself, without a prefix, is neutral — it simply means performance of an act, without judgment as to whether that performance was proper, improper, or absent. Conflating these terms in legal research will produce materially different results across case law and secondary sources.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Gratuitous feasance: A voluntary performance of a service, undertaken without expectation of compensation. Most relevant in bailment law, where it defines the bailment by mandate — a type of bailment in which the bailee performs a service gratuitously for the bailor. Courts and treatise writers have used this phrase to distinguish compensated service relationships (which carry higher standards of care) from purely voluntary ones.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will almost never encounter feasance as a freestanding legal issue in modern sources. Its research value is directional: when you see it, look to the prefixed forms. In Law Mind corpus sources, feasance anchors the cluster of malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance entries across all historical dictionaries, and tracing all three from a single root is essential for complete coverage of conduct-classification issues in tort and public law.
In historical sources — particularly 18th- and 19th-century equity and common law materials — feasance may appear in its older instrumental sense, meaning the making of a deed, bond, or statute. This usage is entirely absent from modern law, and researchers working in historical archives should not assume that "feasance" in a pre-1900 document is pointing toward the tort-classification framework familiar today.
The gratuitous feasance concept in bailment law creates a specific research trap: the standard of care owed by a gratuitous bailee differs from that of a compensated one, and sources that use "feasance" language in a bailment context are almost always addressing that distinction. Anderson's Dictionary makes this connection explicit, tying gratuitous feasance directly to the bailment-by-mandate doctrine.
Jurisdictional variation is not a primary concern for feasance itself, but note that the tort law applications of its compound forms — particularly nonfeasance in the context of duty to act — vary significantly across common law jurisdictions.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries align closely on the core definition. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Anderson's all define feasance as "a doing" or "a performing or performance," with Black's adding the instrumental sense of making a legal document and Anderson's separately calling out gratuitous feasance as a term of art in bailment.
Bouvier's contributes the most useful grammatical context, noting the related forms feasant (doing or making, as in damage feasant) and feasor (doer or maker, as in feasors del estatute — makers of a statute). These derivatives appear in specialized historical contexts — damage feasant in particular survives longer in property and trespass materials — and researchers in older English legal sources should recognize them.
What the historical dictionaries do not do is synthesize the relationship between feasance and its compound forms into a unified analytical framework. That conceptual architecture — feasance as the action-element that mal-, mis-, and non- qualify — is implicit across the sources but never made explicit. Modern tort law scholarship and encyclopedic sources make the framework explicit; the historical dictionaries treat each compound term largely in isolation.
Anderson's citation to Sewell v. Edmonston, 66 Ga. 353 (1881), in connection with gratuitous feasance and bailment is a genuine navigational aid for researchers working in that specific doctrinal area.
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Jurisdictional Note
The standalone term feasance carries no meaningful jurisdictional variation, as it functions primarily as a root form rather than an operative legal standard. The compound terms it generates — particularly nonfeasance and its relationship to affirmative duty to act — vary significantly between U.S. jurisdictions and between American and English common law, and researchers should consult jurisdictional-specific sources when working with those derived concepts.
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