Definition
HIRE has two overlapping legal meanings that both concern compensation, but in different transactional contexts:
1. Compensation for use. The price or payment given for the temporary use of a thing or for labor and services rendered in connection with it. In this sense, hire is the return side of a bailment-for-compensation arrangement — what the bailor receives for allowing another to use property or for performing work on goods.
2. A contract of bailment for compensation. A species of bailment in which one party delivers a thing to another for a particular purpose, and compensation (the hire) is to be paid for either the use of the thing itself or for labor and services bestowed upon it. This contractual sense encompasses a broad family of commercial arrangements: storage, carriage, forwarding, commission sales, and other agency relationships in which goods are received, held, or acted upon in exchange for payment.
In modern employment law, hire also refers colloquially to the act of engaging a worker or to a newly engaged employee, though this usage sits at the edge of the term's technical legal meaning rather than at its center.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Payment for the temporary use of something; also, a person who has been hired, or the state of being employed.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not provide a substantive definition under this spelling, routing readers elsewhere — a gap that itself reflects how common the word was considered at the time.
The legal meaning of hire, as refined in bailment doctrine, is narrower and more precise than the common usage. Everyday speech uses hire interchangeably with employ, rent, or engage. In classical legal usage, hire is specifically the compensation element of a locatio (letting) contract — not merely the relationship itself, but the payment that gives the arrangement its legal character. A researcher reading historical contract or bailment cases must attend to whether hire refers to the payment owed, the contract type, or the act of engagement, because the same word carries all three meanings depending on context.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Classical bailment doctrine organized hire into distinct Latin-named subcategories, each reflecting a different transactional structure:
Locatio rei: The hire of a thing — the owner delivers property to another for use, receiving hire in return. Analogous to a modern rental or lease.
Locatio operis faciendi: The hire of labor or work — a person agrees to perform labor or bestow care and attention on goods delivered to them, for compensation. Encompasses craftsmen, repairers, and service providers who receive another's property to work on it.
Locatio operis mercium vehendarum: The hire of carriage — goods are delivered to a carrier for transport, for a price. The foundation of common carrier law.
These distinctions carried significant legal weight in determining the standard of care owed by the bailee, the risk of loss, and the nature of the bailee's liability. Modern law has largely folded these categories into contract and tort doctrine without preserving the Latin labels, but historical sources use these terms extensively.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century contract and bailment materials will encounter hire as a technical term of art that does not map cleanly onto modern vocabulary. Several traps deserve attention:
The bailment-versus-employment ambiguity. When a historical source refers to a "contract of hire," it may mean a bailment-for-compensation (Bouvier's primary usage) or an employment relationship. Context — specifically, whether goods or labor is the subject — usually resolves this, but careless reading can mislead.
The Latin taxonomy. Historical treatises, especially those influenced by Roman law (Story's Bailments is the key American example), use locatio and its subdivisions as primary organizing concepts. Hire appears as the English gloss for merces (compensation) and sometimes for the entire locatio family. A search for "hire" in historical digests will not surface all relevant material; researchers must also search under locatio, bailment, carriage, and the specific subtypes.
The carrier and warehouseman connection. Bouvier explicitly links hire to the liability framework for warehousemen, carriers, forwarding merchants, factors, and commission agents. Researchers working on carrier liability, storage disputes, or agency law in historical sources should treat hire doctrine as the foundational layer beneath those specific fields.
Modern divergence. Contemporary employment law uses hire almost exclusively to mean the act of engaging a worker or the worker so engaged. The immigration law context (unauthorized worker sanctions) and tort law context (negligent hiring) both use hire in this modern employment sense. These modern uses are largely disconnected from the bailment-compensation tradition. A researcher must not import the compensation-for-use meaning into modern employment hiring cases, or vice versa.
Corpus connections. The two encyclopedia entries linked to this term represent the modern employment-law branch of hire. The bailment tradition is best pursued through entries on locatio, bailment, and common carriers within the contracts and commercial law corpus.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Burrill agree on the core: hire is compensation for use of a thing or for labor and services, and it is the defining feature of a class of bailment. Both treat hire as fundamentally a payment concept embedded in a contractual relationship, not merely an act.
Bouvier's treatment is notably broader, using hire as the organizing concept for an entire family of commercial relationships — carriers, warehousemen, factors, and agents — that modern law would classify under distinct doctrinal headings. This reflects the state of mid-nineteenth-century American commercial law, in which bailment was the primary framework before specialized statutory regimes emerged for carriers and warehousemen.
Burrill is more concise, directing readers to locatio and merces as the governing concepts, and thereby flagging the Roman law substructure that shapes the doctrine throughout this period.
Neither historical dictionary addresses the modern employment-law sense of hire as the act of engaging a worker. That meaning, now dominant in everyday legal usage, developed largely through labor and employment statutes in the twentieth century and is absent from these sources — a significant gap for any researcher using the historical dictionaries as a starting point for modern employment questions.
Jurisdictional Note
The classical bailment framework for hire was broadly shared across American common law jurisdictions, following Kent and Story. Modern employment-law usage of hire is consistent across jurisdictions but is now heavily shaped by federal statute — particularly immigration sanctions law and the National Labor Relations Act — which define hire and hiring practices for their own purposes in ways that may not track state common law usage.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Employer Penalties — Criminal and Civil Sanctions for Knowingly Hiring Unauthorized Workers (Law Mind Immigration Law Encyclopedia)
Vicarious Liability and Joint Tort Liability — Negligent Hiring, Retention, and Supervision (Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia)