Definition
General credit refers to the overall character of a witness as someone who is broadly worthy of belief. It is the reputation a witness carries for truthfulness and reliability as a general matter — assessed without reference to the specific case at hand. When a party attacks or supports a witness's general credit, they are challenging or defending who that witness is as a credible person, not pointing to particular inconsistencies or interests arising from the litigation itself.
Common Confusion
General credit (a witness's broad character for truthfulness) is easily confused with two other uses of "credit" that appear in legal research:
First, particular credit — the other half of the Bouvier/Black's pairing — addresses the witness's credibility as it relates to the specific action. A witness might have impeccable general credit but severely compromised particular credit because of a financial stake in the outcome, a close relationship with a party, or prior statements inconsistent with their testimony.
Second, "credit" in commercial and financial law (creditworthiness, letters of credit, tax credits) is an entirely separate conceptual family. The encyclopedia entries linked below reflect this financial usage. Researchers should confirm which sense of "credit" governs the source they are reading before drawing any doctrinal conclusions.
Why It Matters in Research
The distinction between general credit and particular credit is the research pivot here. General credit concerns the witness's character for truthfulness across time and context; particular credit concerns whether the witness has a specific reason to lie or shade the truth in this specific case — bias, interest, prior inconsistent statements, or relationship to a party. These are different evidentiary tools, tested differently and subject to different rules of impeachment and rehabilitation.
Researchers working in older trial practice materials, especially treatises and appellate records from the nineteenth century, will find this distinction used with precision. Modern evidence law — particularly under the Federal Rules of Evidence — has largely absorbed both concepts under broader impeachment and rehabilitation doctrines, so the explicit label "general credit" appears far less often in contemporary sources. When you encounter "general credit" in historical case law or pleading records, recognize it as a term of art anchoring what we would now frame as character evidence bearing on truthfulness under FRE 608 or its state equivalents.
The practical research trap: do not conflate "general credit" with "creditworthiness" in the financial or commercial law sense. The two terms look identical on the page but occupy entirely different doctrinal universes. A nineteenth-century case discussing a witness's "general credit" has nothing to do with debt, lending, or solvency.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement here, and their entries are nearly identical in substance. Both define general credit as the character of a witness as one generally worthy of credit, and both note the contrast with particular credit. Bouvier adds a citation to 5 Abb. Pr. N.S. 232, an Abbott's Practice Reports reference, which anchors the distinction in New York practice of the mid-to-late nineteenth century — useful context for researchers in that jurisdiction and period.
Neither historical source elaborates on the mechanics of how general credit was established or attacked at trial, nor do they address rehabilitation. For that procedural texture, researchers should look to contemporaneous treatises on evidence such as those by Greenleaf or Wigmore, where the impeachment and support of witness character is treated at length. The dictionary entries serve only as signposts; the substance lives in the treatise literature.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia entries for General Business Credit (tax_82), Retirement Savings Credit (tax_166), and Adoption Credit (tax_6) address "credit" in the tax law sense — entirely distinct from the evidentiary meaning of general credit defined here.