Definition
An archaic and variant spelling of UMPIRE. In legal usage, an impier is a third party called upon to resolve a dispute when arbitrators appointed by opposing sides have failed to reach agreement. The impier's decision, rendered after the deadlock of the primary arbitrators, is binding on the parties in the same manner as a direct arbitral award.
Common Confusion
IMPIER vs. UMPIRE: These are the same legal concept. "Impier" is a historical orthographic variant that fell out of use as spelling standardized in the English legal tradition. Researchers encountering "impier" in older manuscripts, plea rolls, or early printed legal texts should treat it as functionally identical to "umpire." The Black's Law Dictionary entries for this term do nothing more than redirect the reader to "Umpire," confirming that "impier" carried no distinct legal content of its own.
IMPIER vs. ARBITRATOR: The impier and the arbitrator occupy different procedural positions. Arbitrators are selected at the outset by the respective parties and proceed in parallel. The impier enters only upon the failure of those arbitrators to agree — a secondary mechanism of last resort. This distinction matters when reading historical submissions to arbitration, which often named both arbitrators and a named impier in the same instrument.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a paleographic and archival issue. Researchers working in early English legal records, pre-nineteenth-century commercial arbitration documents, or colonial American instruments may encounter "impier" where a modern reader would expect "umpire." Misreading the term as a distinct office or failing to recognize the variant spelling could cause a researcher to overlook the dispute-resolution mechanism built into the document.
The Black's entries are purely redirectional and provide no substantive analysis of the impier's role, powers, or procedural position. For that content, researchers must follow the cross-reference and consult the "Umpire" entries in the same dictionaries. Bouvier's treatment is identical in approach — a bare redirect. This means the historical dictionary shelf offers no independent analysis under this headword.
One secondary point of interest: the first edition of Black's appends a note on "implicata" immediately after the redirect to umpire. This appears to be a typographical artifact of the original printing — a run-on from an adjacent entry — and should not be read as substantive content associated with "impier." Researchers should be alert to this anomaly if working from photostat or digitized versions of the first edition.
Jurisdictional variation is not a meaningful concern here, as the term functions solely as a spelling variant and carries no independent legal content in any jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st Ed.), Black's (2nd Ed.), and Bouvier's — handle this term identically: a one-line redirect to "Umpire" with no independent definition. This unanimity confirms that even in their own era, the compilers viewed "impier" as obsolete or collateral enough to warrant no separate treatment. The term had already receded from active legal usage by the time these dictionaries were compiled. None of the three sources disagrees with the others, because none of them attempts substantive analysis.
The stray reference to "implicata" appearing in the first edition of Black's is the only textual irregularity across the three sources. It does not reflect any historical association between impiers and freight adventures; it is an editorial artifact.