Definition
To hinder means to interpose obstacles or impediments that obstruct another party's ability to exercise a legal right, collect a debt, or obtain legal relief. In legal usage, the word functions primarily as a verb describing conduct that delays, obstructs, or impedes — whether by active interference or by interposing unjustifiable delay between a creditor and the property from which that creditor is entitled to seek satisfaction.
The term appears most frequently in two overlapping legal contexts:
1. Fraudulent conveyance and debtor-creditor law. Transfers or assignments made to "hinder, delay, or defraud" creditors are void or voidable under fraudulent transfer doctrine. Here, hindering connotes more than mere delay — it implies conduct designed to place assets beyond the practical reach of creditors, whether through covin (collusive fraud), malice, or other bad-faith arrangement for the debtor's own benefit.
2. General obstruction. More broadly, to hinder any party in the exercise of a legal right is to impose an obstacle not authorized by law. This usage appears in criminal statutes (hindering prosecution, hindering a law enforcement officer), contract law (where a party may not hinder the other's performance), and property law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The buttocks.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Of or belonging to the rear; the back part — as in "the hinder part of a wagon."
In ordinary English, "hinder" as a noun or adjective refers to the rear portion of something. As a verb in common speech, it means simply to slow down or get in the way of. The legal meaning is exclusively verbal and carries a specific freight: deliberate interposition of obstacles with legal consequence, particularly in the context of fraud on creditors. A researcher encountering "hinder" in a legal instrument should not import the ordinary sense of mere inconvenience — legal usage implies purposeful obstruction with potential voidability or criminal consequence attached.
Common Confusion
"Hinder," "delay," and "defraud" appear together so consistently in fraudulent conveyance statutes and pleadings that they are often treated as synonymous. They are not. To hinder is to obstruct — to put something in the way. To delay is to extend time unjustifiably. To defraud implies an intent to cause actual loss through deceit. A conveyance may hinder and delay without technically defrauding if the debtor remains solvent; it defrauds when creditors suffer actual injury. Courts and historical dictionaries alike treat the three as a cumulative phrase designed to capture the full range of bad-faith debtor conduct, but each element has independent content. Researchers analyzing early fraudulent conveyance cases should not assume the presence of one word implies the others.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "hinder, delay, or defraud" is the operative language in fraudulent transfer statutes descending from the Statute of 13 Elizabeth (1571). When researching pre-twentieth century cases, this phrase functions almost as a term of art and should be searched as a unit, not word by word. Courts frequently parsed which element of the triad was satisfied, so a case holding that a conveyance "hindered" creditors may have a different doctrinal posture than one finding actual fraud.
In criminal law sources, "hinder" underwent expansion through the twentieth century as obstruction-of-justice statutes proliferated. A search for "hinder" in nineteenth-century criminal materials will return far fewer hits than in modern statutory compilations, where "hindering prosecution" is a standalone offense in most jurisdictions. Researchers should adjust date ranges accordingly and not assume continuity of usage across eras.
Anderson's definition is particularly useful for the creditor-fraud context: it specifies that the hindering must be sought "through covin or malice on the part of the debtor for his benefit" — language that excludes good-faith transactions that happen to delay a creditor. This intent element is critical when evaluating whether historical sources are applying a subjective or objective standard.
In contract law, the prevention doctrine — that a party may not hinder the occurrence of a condition on which its own obligation depends — uses "hinder" in a closely related but doctrinally distinct sense. Researchers moving between creditor-fraud materials and contract materials should be alert to this shift in context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is terse: "to interpose obstacles or impediments," citing a Kentucky authority. This reflects the general-law definition and does not foreground the fraudulent conveyance context that dominated practical usage of the word.
Anderson's entry is more useful for research purposes. It anchors the word squarely in debtor-creditor law, specifies the intent requirement (covin or malice for the debtor's benefit), and distinguishes the "hindering and delaying" that vitiates an assignment from mere incidental delay. Anderson also captures the time dimension — interposing "some time, unjustifiably" before a creditor can reach assets — which is relevant to cases where the debtor's scheme was delay rather than permanent concealment.
Neither dictionary addresses the criminal law usage or the contract-law prevention doctrine, gaps that become significant when researching twentieth-century materials. Researchers relying solely on these historical sources for "hinder" in a criminal or contract context will need to supplement with modern statutory and treatise sources.
Jurisdictional Note
"Hinder" as statutory language in fraudulent transfer law is substantially uniform across U.S. jurisdictions through the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act (1984) and its successor, the Uniform Voidable Transactions Act (2014), both of which preserve the classic "hinder, delay, or defraud" triad. Criminal statutes using "hinder" — particularly hindering prosecution and hindering a peace officer — vary more significantly by state in their elements and grading.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Fraudulent Conveyances; Obstruction of Justice; Prevention Doctrine (Contracts)