Definition
Fictitious, simulated, or pretended; not genuine or real. In legal usage, "feigned" describes an act, issue, proceeding, or relationship that is constructed or arranged by the parties to serve a procedural or legal purpose, as distinct from fraud or deception intended to harm. The term appears most often in the compound phrase "feigned issue" and in descriptions of feigned accomplices in criminal investigation contexts.
1. Feigned issue: A fictional lawsuit or action crafted by parties — with the sanction of the court — to submit a disputed question of fact to a jury for determination, when no actual cause of action existed between them. The judgment in such an action was not binding as a precedent or enforceable in itself; it served purely as a vehicle for resolving the factual dispute.
2. Feigned accomplice: A person who simulates participation in a criminal scheme — typically at the direction of law enforcement or prosecutorial authority — for the purpose of gathering evidence against actual conspirators. The feigned accomplice does not share criminal intent and is not regarded as a true principal or accessory.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simple past and past participle of "feign"; broadly, to have pretended or simulated something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Not real or genuine; pretended; counterfeit; insincere; false." Webster's illustrates with "a feigned friend" and scriptural references to insincere lips and hearts.
In ordinary usage, "feigned" carries a consistently negative moral valence — feigning implies deception and bad faith. Legal usage breaks sharply from this. A feigned issue or feigned action was a recognized, court-sanctioned procedural device, not a fraud upon the court. The parties and the court all understood and accepted the fictional premise. Researchers reading historical legal sources must resist importing the common-language connotation of wrongful pretense into these procedural contexts.
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Common Confusion
FEIGNED vs. FRAUDULENT: A feigned proceeding is distinguished from a fraudulent one precisely by transparency and consent. Collusive or feigned actions known to the court were procedurally legitimate, if increasingly disfavored. Fraudulent proceedings, by contrast, conceal their simulated character from the tribunal and constitute grounds for invalidation. Historical sources sometimes use "feigned" and "collusive" interchangeably; researchers should note that collusive actions carried more negative connotation over time as courts grew skeptical of manufactured litigation.
FEIGNED ISSUE vs. SPECIAL VERDICT: Both devices resolved disputed factual questions, but a feigned issue did so through a fictional cause of action constructed for the purpose, while a special verdict arose within a genuine pending action. Conflating the two in historical research obscures how courts managed jury fact-finding before modern procedural reforms.
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Why It Matters in Research
The practical importance of "feigned" in the Law Mind corpus is almost entirely historical. The feigned issue was a product of common law procedural rigidity — courts of equity and chancery sometimes lacked direct mechanisms to submit factual questions to a jury, and the feigned action supplied that gap. As equity and common law procedure merged through the nineteenth-century reforms (the English Judicature Acts, and in American jurisdictions through code pleading reforms following the Field Code), the need for feigned issues largely disappeared. Researchers working in pre-reform equity materials, particularly English chancery records and early American equity practice, will encounter feigned issues as a routine procedural mechanism rather than as something suspect.
Two navigational traps are common. First, the Anderson's entry for FEIGNED redirects entirely to ISSUE, which means researchers using that dictionary will miss the standalone definition unless they follow the cross-reference. Second, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry filed under the page for FEIGNED is actually displaced content about base fees and estates tail — an apparent indexing or typographic error in the source volume — and contains no substantive definition of the term itself. Do not rely on Rapalje & Lawrence for this entry.
The feigned accomplice usage requires separate attention. It surfaces in criminal law and evidence contexts well into the modern period, particularly in discussions of entrapment, agency, and the liability of undercover operatives. The feigned accomplice's lack of criminal intent is the conceptual hinge connecting historical usage to modern entrapment doctrine.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the most serviceable definition: "Fictitious; pretended; supposititious; simulated," followed by specific treatment of the feigned accomplice. Black's usage of "supposititious" (substituted or assumed, often without right) maps cleanly onto the procedural sense. Anderson's offers no independent definition, routing the reader to ISSUE. Rapalje & Lawrence, as noted, contains what appears to be a misplaced entry on base fees entirely unrelated to the term. Researchers should treat Rapalje & Lawrence as unhelpful on this point.
None of the historical dictionaries address the decline of feigned issues following procedural reform, which is the context most researchers actually need. The historical sources reflect the term as a going concern; the reader must supply the awareness that by the late nineteenth century the device was already archaic in most American jurisdictions.
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Jurisdictional Note
The feigned issue was primarily an English common law and equity device. American reception was uneven: some early state courts employed the mechanism, but code pleading states moved away from it rapidly after mid-nineteenth century reforms. English abolition came with the Judicature Acts. Researchers in pre-reform American equity cases should check whether a given state's chancery practice incorporated feigned issues before assuming the device was available or recognized there.
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