Definition
Good repute means having a favorable standing in the community — that is, being regarded by others as honest, law-abiding, and worthy of trust. The phrase is synonymous with "good reputation" and carries no independent legal meaning beyond that equivalence. It appears most often in older statutes and legal instruments as a baseline character requirement: licensing laws, professional admissions standards, immigration and naturalization conditions, and testimonial rules governing character witnesses all historically used "good repute" (or "good moral character and repute") to describe the threshold a person must meet. The phrase functions as a legal shorthand for positive community standing rather than a technical standard with fixed elements.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Repute" means the opinion generally held of a person or thing; reputation. "Good repute" in ordinary speech simply means being well thought of.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Repute" is defined as the character attributed to a person or thing by popular opinion; reputation — and is used in both positive and negative constructions ("in good repute," "ill repute").
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow but real. In everyday speech "good repute" is a vague compliment. In legal contexts it has operated as a threshold standard: courts and legislatures have had to define what community standing is sufficient to satisfy the requirement, making it an evidentiary and regulatory concept rather than merely a social one.
Common Confusion
Good repute is sometimes used interchangeably with good moral character, but the two are not identical. Good moral character is a broader, more searching standard used in bar admissions, immigration, and professional licensing, and it may encompass an applicant's private conduct, mental state, and personal ethics regardless of community knowledge. Good repute, by contrast, focuses on how a person is actually regarded by others — it is an outward, community-facing measure. A person might have good repute in a community without satisfying the deeper inquiry of good moral character, or theoretically the reverse. Researchers should not assume statutes or cases treat these phrases as interchangeable without checking the specific authority.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase is a period marker. "Good repute" appears heavily in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century statutes and legal instruments and drops out of modern drafting in favor of "good reputation," "good moral character," or specific regulatory criteria. When researching older licensing statutes, naturalization requirements, bar admission rules, or property deed restrictions, encountering "good repute" signals that the document predates modern administrative precision.
Trap in historical sources: older courts treated good repute as provable only through reputation testimony — what the community said about a person — not through opinion testimony or specific instances of conduct. Modern evidence rules (particularly Federal Rule of Evidence 405 and its state analogs) now permit opinion testimony as well. A researcher reading historical cases on how to prove good repute must be alert to this methodological shift; the evidentiary route available in the historical case may not be the only route available today, and vice versa.
Jurisdictional traps: many older state licensing statutes still use "good repute" in their text even when case law has effectively read the phrase to mean whatever the modern character standard requires. The statutory language and the operative legal standard may have diverged.
Corpus connection: this term connects naturally to character evidence rules (how good repute is proved at trial) and to employment and professional licensing contexts (where character standards condition entry to a field). Researchers moving from "good repute" as a statutory requirement to the evidentiary question of how to prove it should cross to the character evidence materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary treats good repute as a pure synonym for good reputation and offers no independent definition beyond that equivalence, citing a Missouri case for the proposition. This is the full extent of Bouvier's treatment, which reflects how the phrase was used: as drafting convention, not as a term of art with elaborated legal doctrine attached to it. Bouvier does not attempt to define what good reputation requires, leaving that to the substantive law of the context in which the phrase appears. Historical dictionaries generally give this term minimal treatment for the same reason — its content was always borrowed from the surrounding legal framework rather than self-defining.
Jurisdictional Note
State licensing statutes vary in whether they retain "good repute" language or have replaced it with "good moral character" or specific enumerated disqualifiers. The operative standard in any jurisdiction depends on how courts and agencies in that jurisdiction have interpreted the controlling statute, and older "good repute" language has sometimes been construed to incorporate modern character standards without legislative update.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Methods of Proving Character — Rule 405 (Reputation, Opinion, Specific Instances), The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia — directly governs how good repute is proved in a federal evidentiary context.