Definition
An indorser — that is, a person who signs the back of a negotiable instrument, such as a bill of exchange or promissory note, thereby transferring rights in the instrument and, in most cases, assuming secondary liability for its payment. The term is a Latinized form used in legal pleadings and formal instruments, particularly in older common law practice, to designate the party who has written an indorsement.
Common Confusion
INDOSSANS vs. INDORSEE: These two Latin-form terms are easily conflated in historical documents. The indossans is the party making the indorsement — the transferor. The indorsee is the party receiving the instrument by virtue of that indorsement — the transferee. In scanning older pleadings or case reports, misreading one for the other inverts the legal relationship entirely and will produce errors in tracing chains of title to a negotiable instrument.
INDOSSANS vs. INDORSOR: These are functionally equivalent terms. Indorsor (or endorsor) is the anglicized form; indossans is the Latinized pleading form. In historical sources they refer to the same legal actor. The distinction is one of register and period, not of substance.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in formal Latin pleading contexts and in legal dictionaries and treatises predating widespread adoption of anglicized commercial law vocabulary. Researchers are most likely to encounter indossans in indictments, Latin pleading forms, and early English reports involving negotiable instruments — particularly cases arising before the full consolidation of modern bills of exchange doctrine in the nineteenth century.
The critical research trap is encountering the term in a printed case report or indictment and not recognizing it as the party designation for the indorser. Because the term drops out of common usage relatively early, even competent lawyers reading historical records may gloss over it or misread it as a generic Latin particle rather than a specific legal actor label.
The Burrill entry points to Rex v. Bigg as an illustrative case involving the legal meaning of "indorsement" itself — specifically, whether a receipt written on the face of a note qualified as an indorsement for purposes of a criminal charge of forgery or erasure. That case signals an important navigational point: the boundary between what counts as an indorsement (and therefore what conduct toward it carries legal consequences) was contested well into the eighteenth century. Researchers tracing the history of indorsement doctrine should follow the Bigg line of cases before assuming modern definitions apply to historical instruments.
The term also surfaces in civil law and mixed civil-common law jurisdictions, where Italian and Spanish commercial law traditions — which contributed the root indosso (to indorse) — remained influential. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec, or early American mercantile records may find indossans appearing in contexts shaped by civilian as well as common law traditions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines indossans simply as "an indorser" and treats the term as Latin. Burrill's entry is brief but anchored to a real and significant case: Rex v. Bigg, 3 P. Wms. 419. The fragment preserved in Burrill indicates the case turned on whether a receipt written on the face and inside of a Bank of England note — described by the bank as an "indorsement" — constituted an indorsement in the legal sense sufficient to support the criminal charge. This is a genuine doctrinal moment: it illustrates that the legal definition of indorsement was not self-evident and that the physical location and function of writing on a negotiable instrument were live questions.
No other source dictionaries in the present corpus carry a dedicated entry for indossans. The term's absence from later dictionaries (Black's, Bouvier's) is itself informative: by the time those works were compiled, anglicized vocabulary had largely displaced Latin pleading forms in negotiable instruments practice, and indorser had fully absorbed the actor-description function indossans once served in formal records.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is effectively confined to English common law pleading and early Anglo-American commercial practice. Civil law jurisdictions used cognate but distinct vocabulary drawn from Italian and French mercantile tradition. Modern U.S. and U.K. instruments law uses indorser exclusively; indossans will not appear in any current statutory or regulatory context.