Definition
Good consideration is a category of contractual consideration grounded in moral duty, natural affection, or generosity rather than in any exchange of economic value. The classic example is a grant of property from a parent to a child, supported by the natural love and affection between them. Good consideration stands in deliberate contrast to valuable consideration, which consists of money, goods, services, or some other benefit with ascertainable economic worth.
The distinction is not merely semantic. Good consideration has historically been recognized as legally sufficient to support certain transactions — particularly voluntary conveyances within a family — but it does not carry the same enforceability as valuable consideration in ordinary contract law. A promise supported only by good consideration generally cannot be enforced by the promisee as a contractual right. Its primary relevance arose in the law of conveyances and in the interpretation of statutes requiring "good and valuable consideration," where courts were required to determine whether natural affection alone was enough to satisfy the statutory standard.
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Common Confusion
GOOD CONSIDERATION vs. VALUABLE CONSIDERATION
These terms are frequently encountered together — "good and valuable consideration" is a standard recital in deeds and contracts — and the pairing obscures an important distinction. Valuable consideration is consideration with economic content: money, a promise, a benefit conferred, or a detriment suffered. Good consideration is moral or affectionate in character and carries no measurable economic weight. The conflation matters because, in many legal contexts, good consideration alone was insufficient to defeat the claims of creditors or subsequent purchasers for value. A voluntary conveyance supported only by natural love and affection could be set aside as fraudulent against creditors even if the grantor acted in good faith; a conveyance for valuable consideration generally could not. Researchers who encounter "good and valuable consideration" in old deeds should treat it as a boilerplate recital, not as evidence that both types were independently present.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term is predominantly a creature of older legal writing and historical case law. Modern contract doctrine has largely collapsed the good consideration / valuable consideration distinction, treating enforceability as turning on whether there is any consideration at all — nominal or otherwise — rather than on its moral character. Researchers working in the corpus should expect to encounter good consideration primarily in:
**Pre-twentieth-century conveyancing materials.** Deeds from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries routinely recite "for the love and affection I bear toward my son/daughter" as the stated consideration for a grant. Whether this satisfied the applicable statute of frauds or fraudulent conveyance law in that jurisdiction was a live question, and the case law is inconsistent.
**Fraudulent conveyance analysis.** The most practically significant dimension of good consideration was its weakness against creditors. Courts repeatedly held that a voluntary conveyance — one supported by good consideration only — could be avoided by a grantor's creditors, even absent actual fraudulent intent. The Statute of Elizabeth (1571) and its American descendants made this a central battleground. Researchers tracing a title dispute or a creditor's bill in equity will find good consideration at the center of the argument.
**Statutory interpretation.** When older statutes required "good consideration" or "good and sufficient consideration," courts had to decide whether the legislature meant something broader than valuable consideration or was using the phrase as a synonym for it. Burrill and Rapalje both flag this problem, and the case law cited in Rapalje reflects genuine judicial disagreement.
**Cross-corpus navigation.** The encyclopedia entry on Adequacy of Consideration and Nominal Consideration is the most relevant modern framework for understanding where good consideration fits in contemporary doctrine — specifically, the principle that courts do not inquire into the adequacy of consideration once the threshold of any consideration is met. Good consideration occupies the conceptual space just below that threshold: morally weighty but legally thin.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Rapalje, and Burrill are in full agreement on the core definition: good consideration is founded on natural love and affection, or blood relationship, and is distinguished from valuable consideration by the absence of economic content. All three sources treat the good/valuable distinction as a settled doctrinal category.
Burrill is the most economical, limiting the definition to blood relationship and the motivational triad of generosity, prudence, and natural duty. Black's and Rapalje track each other closely and both point toward the broader category of CONSIDERATION for further treatment.
What the historical dictionaries understate is the practical stakes of the distinction. None of the three entries explains clearly that good consideration's primary legal significance lay in its vulnerability to avoidance — that a conveyance for love and affection, however sincere, offered no protection against the grantor's creditors. This gap is significant for corpus researchers, because the cases cited in Rapalje (including the Peters and Cranch reporters references) are largely creditor and fraudulent conveyance disputes, not simple enforceability questions.
The historical sources also do not address the decline of the category. By the early twentieth century, good consideration had ceased to function as an independent analytical category in most American jurisdictions. It survives largely as a relic in deed recitals and as a point of historical contrast in treatises on consideration doctrine.
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Jurisdictional Note
The treatment of good consideration in fraudulent conveyance contexts varied by state, depending on whether the jurisdiction had adopted the Statute of Elizabeth by reception, by local statute, or had replaced it with a version of the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act (now the Uniform Voidable Transactions Act). Researchers should not assume that colonial-era or early republic case law on this point reflects the rule in a given state after statutory revision.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Contracts — Adequacy of Consideration and Nominal Consideration (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)
Contracts — Past Consideration and Moral Obligation (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)
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