Definition
"Get by," as a legal expression, means that a person has performed some act and has avoided the harmful or detrimental consequences that would ordinarily follow from that act. The phrase carries the sense of escaping liability, penalty, or adverse legal effect — not merely avoiding detection, but evading the practical or legal consequences typically attached to conduct of that kind.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To subsist; to succeed, survive, or manage, at least at a minimal level.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined as a phrase; "get" and "by" treated as independent terms.
The gap between common and legal meaning is worth noting. In ordinary English, "get by" suggests bare adequacy — scraping through, managing minimally. In legal usage, the phrase is more pointed: it means not merely surviving a situation but specifically escaping the injurious consequences that conduct normally produces. The legal sense implies a norm violated without the expected consequence attached, which is a meaningful distinction from the colloquial sense of modest sufficiency.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears in Bouvier anchored to a single Kentucky citation, signaling that it functioned less as a formal term of art and more as a descriptive phrase drawn from judicial language. Researchers working with early twentieth-century American case law — particularly state appellate opinions — may encounter "get by" used in this evaluative sense when courts are characterizing a party's conduct or discussing whether consequences attached to an act. The phrase would rarely appear in a statute or pleading; look for it in judicial reasoning sections.
Because it is ordinary language pressed into a quasi-technical descriptive role, historical indexing may not flag it reliably. A researcher relying solely on headnotes or digest classifications may miss its significance in context. Full-text searching of primary sources is the more reliable approach when tracking how courts use this phrase.
The phrase also carries implicit normative content: when a court says a party "got by," it often signals disapproval or at least awareness that the outcome departed from what the law would ideally produce. This makes it useful for understanding judicial attitude in a passage even when it is not doing formal doctrinal work.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and it provides a concise and precise definition grounded in a specific case reference. The definition does the work cleanly: act performed, consequences typically attending that act, consequences escaped. No other major historical legal dictionaries — Black's, Burrill, Wharton — appear to have elevated this phrase to a standalone entry, which is consistent with its status as expressive judicial language rather than a formal legal term. Bouvier's inclusion of it reflects the dictionary's broader practice of capturing the working vocabulary of American courts, not just canonical doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The sole historical citation supporting this definition is from Kentucky (162 Ky. 298), and the phrase's legal use as defined here appears to be rooted in American rather than English legal usage. Researchers working in British Commonwealth sources should not expect this phrase to carry the same technical coloration, though the ordinary meaning would be understood.