Definition
Legal obstacles or disabilities that prevent a person from entering into a valid legal act, most commonly a contract or a marriage. The term operates in two distinct contexts:
1. Impediments to contract: Legal incapacities that bar a person from forming a binding contract, including minority (infancy), mental incapacity (want of reason), and coverture (the historical disability of a married woman to contract independently). A person subject to such an impediment lacks the legal capacity to be bound.
2. Impediments to marriage: Bars recognized by civil and canon law that prohibit or invalidate a marriage. These are further divided into categories based on their legal effect — some render a proposed marriage absolutely forbidden, while others render a completed marriage void from the outset.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of impediment — things that impede or obstruct.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Obstacles or hindrances; that which impedes progress or action.
The ordinary meaning — anything that gets in the way — is far broader than the legal meaning. In law, impediments are not merely practical obstacles but formal, recognized legal disabilities that operate by rule of law, not circumstance. A person may face every practical difficulty in the world and have no legal impediment; conversely, a legal impediment exists even when the transaction could easily proceed as a practical matter.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Absolute impediments: Prohibit a person from marrying at all, but where a prohibited marriage nonetheless occurs, it is not necessarily void — the legal consequence depends on the specific impediment and applicable law. The prohibition is against the marriage; the marriage's validity is a separate question.
Dirimant impediments: The stronger category. These render a marriage void (or voidable, depending on the jurisdiction and tradition) from the moment of solemnization. Examples include prior undissolved marriage (bigamy), certain degrees of consanguinity or affinity, and lack of the capacity to consent. The term "dirimant" comes from the canon law tradition and remains the technical term in ecclesiastical and civil law sources.
Prohibitive impediments: A third category recognized in canon law — bars that make a marriage unlawful but do not void it if entered into. Less commonly treated in common law sources.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter this term in two largely separate bodies of law that rarely speak to each other in the sources: contract capacity doctrine and marriage law. Conflating these two contexts when reading historical materials is a real hazard.
In contract research, impediments tracks closely with the concept of legal capacity. Historical sources using impediments in the contract sense are almost always discussing the group of persons who could not be sued or bound — principally infants, lunatics, and, before the Married Women's Property Acts of the nineteenth century, married women. Post-coverture reform, the married-woman impediment effectively disappeared from contract doctrine, but you will find it in sources well into the late nineteenth century. Researchers working with materials from before roughly 1870–1900 (depending on jurisdiction) must account for coverture as an active impediment in any contract analysis involving a woman as a party.
In marriage law research, impediments is a technical term inherited from Roman civil law and extensively developed in canon law. The dirimant/absolute/prohibitive taxonomy is primarily a civilian and ecclesiastical framework. Common law jurisdictions absorbed parts of this structure through ecclesiastical courts, which historically had jurisdiction over marriage validity in England. American researchers will find this vocabulary in early domestic relations treatises and in sources discussing void versus voidable marriages — the dirimant impediment maps roughly onto void marriages, while lesser impediments may map onto voidable ones. This mapping is imprecise and jurisdiction-dependent.
The term also surfaces in statute of limitations research. "Impediment" appears in some jurisdictions' tolling statutes as a synonym for legal disability that suspends the running of limitations — a usage related to but distinct from both the contract and marriage contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in substantial agreement on the core definition: impediments are legal disabilities or hindrances to the formation of contracts, with the examples of coverture, infancy, and want of reason repeated across all three sources. This consistency reflects the settled common law understanding through the nineteenth century.
Where the sources diverge usefully is in their treatment of marriage law. Black's (both editions) addresses the civil law taxonomy — absolute and dirimant impediments — in some detail. Bouvier's, by contrast, addresses only the contract sense and cross-references the CONTRACT entry rather than developing marriage doctrine separately. This divergence is itself informative: Bouvier's reflects a more common-law-centric orientation, while Black's acknowledges the civilian framework that underpins marriage law even in American courts.
What the historical dictionaries underserve: none of them systematically addresses how impediments interact with equitable doctrines (for instance, whether equity would relieve a party from an impediment in particular circumstances), and none fully traces the erosion of the coverture impediment following legislative reform. Researchers relying on these dictionaries without supplementing them with statutory history will miss a significant doctrinal shift.
Jurisdictional Note
In American states, the marriage impediment framework is governed by state statute and varies considerably — particularly regarding prohibited degrees of relationship and the consequences (void versus voidable) of marrying in violation of a restriction. The canon law vocabulary (dirimant, absolute) remains more alive in Catholic ecclesiastical practice and in civil law jurisdictions than in American common law courts, where courts more typically ask simply whether a marriage is void or voidable.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Capacity to Contract; Marriage, Formation and Validity; Coverture