Definition
The party who takes possession or use of a thing, labor, or services from another in exchange for compensation. In contract and bailment law, the hirer is the recipient in a hire arrangement — the person or entity that obtains temporary use of property or engages another's services under a rental or hiring agreement, as distinguished from the owner or provider who receives payment.
The hirer stands opposite the letter (the one who lets or hires out). In property hire, the hirer gains a possessory interest for the duration of the arrangement without acquiring title. In service hire, the hirer engages the labor or skill of another, creating obligations and liabilities that vary depending on whether the engaged party is an employee, independent contractor, or bailee.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Someone who hires — a general agent noun for any person who engages another for work or use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who hires.
The common usage is not wrong, but it is imprecise in a legally consequential way. In ordinary speech, "hirer" most readily calls to mind employment. In law, the term is equally at home in bailment and property contexts, where the hirer acquires possession of a thing rather than the services of a person. A researcher who reads "hirer" in a historical property or bailment source and maps it onto an employment framework will misread the legal relationship entirely.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Hirer of goods or chattels: Takes temporary possession of a movable thing under a contract of hire. Bears duties of care during possession and obligations of return. The relationship is a form of bailment for hire.
Hirer of services: Engages the labor or skill of another. Whether this creates a master-servant, employer-independent contractor, or other relationship depends on the degree of control retained and other factors developed under common law and statute.
Why It Matters in Research
The term "hirer" appears most frequently in older English and commonwealth-influenced treatises and cases on bailment and contract. Researchers should be alert to two navigational challenges.
First, the word is not uniformly preferred in American legal sources. American courts and statutes more often use "bailee," "lessee," "renter," or "employer" depending on context. When a historical source uses "hirer," it is often drawing on English common law categories, and the researcher should look to bailment doctrine rather than landlord-tenant or employment frameworks to find the controlling rules.
Second, in the hire-of-services context, the legal consequences attached to the hirer — liability for injuries, obligation to provide safe conditions, responsibility for acts of the hired party — shifted dramatically across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as master-servant doctrine evolved into modern employment law. A source describing the hirer's duties from 1880 may not describe them as they stood in 1930 or as they stand today. Tracing the term across time requires attention to which legal framework was operative when the source was written.
The Bouvier entry's cross-reference to BAILMENT is the appropriate starting point for property-hire research. For service-hire, the corpus connections run to master and servant, independent contractor, and respondeat superior entries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on a compact, functional definition without significant disagreement. Black's (both editions) defines the hirer as one who hires a thing or the labor or services of another — a deliberately broad formulation that spans both property and service contexts. The second edition grounds the definition in Turner v. Cross, a Texas case that involved a hired vehicle and the liability questions flowing from that relationship, anchoring the term in concrete bailment fact patterns.
Burrill identifies the hirer's Latin equivalent as conductor, a Roman law term for the party in a locatio conductio (hire contract) who receives the thing or service. This classical grounding is useful: it signals that the English law of hire has deep civil-law antecedents, and researchers working in jurisdictions with mixed common-law and civil-law heritage — particularly Louisiana or jurisdictions influenced by Scots law — may find that "conductor" terminology persists in older sources.
Bouvier's entry is the sparsest, directing the reader to BAILMENT without elaboration. The appended note on "hirst or hurst" is a separate Old English term for a wood and has no connection to hirer; its appearance in the same entry is an artifact of alphabetical proximity in the original volume, not a legal relationship.
None of the historical dictionaries explore the distinctions between hire of goods and hire of services in detail, which is where the practical legal complexity lives. Researchers should not expect the dictionary entries themselves to resolve questions about the hirer's duties of care, risk of loss, or liability — those answers require treatise and case sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Commonwealth jurisdictions, particularly England and Australia, use "hirer" more consistently and formally than American sources, where "lessee," "renter," or "bailee" tends to dominate. In Louisiana, the civil-law concept of lease (louage) maps onto hire arrangements, and terminology may differ further. Researchers working across jurisdictions should not assume terminological equivalence without confirming the applicable legal framework.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Bailment; Contracts of Hire; Master and Servant