Definition
LEAVE carries three distinct legal meanings, and context determines which applies:
1. Permission or authorization granted by a court or authority. In procedural law, "leave" means formal permission to do something that would otherwise require the court's approval — to amend a pleading, to file a late document, to intervene in an action, or to appeal out of time. This is the dominant meaning in litigation practice. "Leave of court" is the standard phrase.
2. Authorized absence from work or duty. In employment and labor law, "leave" refers to a period during which an employee is permitted to be absent from work, typically with some form of legal protection, job guarantee, or compensation. Familiar forms include medical leave, family leave, parental leave, military leave, and administrative leave.
3. To dispose of by will; to bequeath. In the law of wills and succession, "leave" means to give property by testamentary disposition. A testator who "leaves" property to a named person is directing that property to pass at death through the will. This meaning is older and appears prominently in historical sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Permission to be absent; time away from one's work. Also: permission generally; farewell or departure.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To send out leaves; to leaf. (The dominant botanical/intransitive sense.) The permission and departure senses also appeared in general use by this period.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant in two directions. First, everyday speakers use "leave" primarily to mean departure or absence, while courts use it almost exclusively to mean formal permission — a researcher encountering "leave" in a judicial opinion should default to the procedural sense unless context indicates otherwise. Second, the testamentary sense ("I leave my estate to my children") sounds natural in ordinary English but carries precise legal weight in will construction; courts interpreting that word in a will are not simply reading plain English but applying a legal presumption that it signals testamentary intent.
Common Confusion
Three meanings that share the same word invite misreading across document types:
— "Leave" in a court order or brief means court-granted permission, not an absence.
— "Leave" in an employment statute, policy, or contract means an authorized absence from work, often with specific statutory protections attached.
— "Leave" in a will or estate document means a testamentary disposition — effectively a synonym for "bequeath" or "devise," depending on the nature of the property.
Researchers working across practice areas should not carry assumptions from one context into another. A case addressing "leave to amend" has nothing to do with employment leave statutes, and a will construction dispute over the word "leave" implicates testamentary intent doctrine, not labor law.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Procedural leave: Leave of court; leave to amend; leave to appeal; leave to file; leave to intervene; leave nisi (provisional leave subject to cause shown).
Employment leave: Medical or sick leave; family and medical leave (federally regulated in the U.S. under FMLA); parental or maternity/paternity leave; military leave; administrative leave; garden leave (a contractual form discussed separately below); paid and unpaid leave.
Testamentary leave: Functionally synonymous with bequest (personal property) or devise (real property) in older usage, though modern practice tends to use those more specific terms.
Ticket of leave: A historical term from English and colonial criminal law referring to a conditional release of a convict before the expiration of sentence — a precursor to parole. Bouvier directs readers here.
Garden leave: A contractual arrangement in which an employee who has given or received notice is required to remain away from the workplace during the notice period while continuing to receive full pay and benefits. Functions as a paid non-compete buffer. Common in financial services and other industries with sensitive client relationships or confidential information concerns.
Why It Matters in Research
The term's multiplicity is the primary research hazard. Full-text searching for "leave" across the Law Mind corpus will return hits from procedural case law, employment statutes and regulations, collective bargaining agreements, and estate documents — often in the same search results. Researchers must filter by document type and practice area before drawing conclusions.
In procedural research, "leave of court" is the operative phrase. Standards for granting leave vary by context: leave to amend under federal practice is governed by a liberality standard (freely given when justice so requires), while leave to appeal out of time is discretionary and more guarded. Historical cases may use "leave" where modern practice would say "permission" or "authorization."
In employment research, the statutory landscape has layered significantly since the mid-twentieth century. Pre-FMLA sources will not reflect federal leave entitlements. State leave laws frequently exceed federal minimums, and researchers cannot assume that a pre-1993 source accurately describes current employer obligations. The interaction of leave rights with workers' compensation, disability accommodation, and short-term disability insurance creates overlapping frameworks that must be traced through multiple bodies of law.
In estate research, the testamentary sense of "leave" is well-established but can create ambiguity when a will uses "leave" alongside "give," "bequeath," or "devise." Courts have generally treated "leave" as a word of testamentary disposition rather than mere precatory language, but older cases should be read with attention to the specific interpretive rules of the jurisdiction and period.
Garden leave clauses are a modern contractual development with limited direct historical antecedent. Research in this area will find most relevant authority in case law post-1990 and in employment contract drafting literature rather than in classical legal dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are largely unanimous on the testamentary sense. Black's (both editions), Anderson's, and Burrill's each define "leave" as meaning to give or dispose of by will, and all either quote or reference Thorley v. Thorley, 10 East 438, for the proposition that "leave," as applied to subject matter, prima facie signals a testamentary disposition. This consensus is useful for researchers working with older will construction cases: the word carried a recognized legal presumption from at least the early nineteenth century.
Anderson's adds a secondary sense — "to die seized of or owning" — which is distinct from the testamentary sense and reflects how "leave" appears in factual recitations describing what a decedent held at death, not what the decedent directed to happen to it. This distinction matters for estate research: "she left a house on Maple Street" (died owning) is different from "she left the house on Maple Street to her daughter" (testamentary direction).
Bouvier redirects readers to "ticket of leave" without further elaboration under the main entry — a reminder that in mid-nineteenth-century American legal usage, the criminal-law sense was prominent enough to warrant its own cross-reference.
None of the historical sources address the procedural sense (leave of court) or the employment sense in any developed way. These meanings either postdate the editions or were too embedded in practice to merit separate dictionary treatment. Researchers should not infer from this silence that the procedural sense was absent — it was in widespread use — but historical dictionaries are not reliable guides to its scope or standards.
Jurisdictional Note
Employment leave law varies substantially by jurisdiction. Federal law (FMLA, USERRA, and others) sets floors that states routinely exceed. Several states have enacted paid family leave insurance programs with no federal analog. Garden leave enforcement depends heavily on whether the jurisdiction treats it as a reasonable restraint of trade or subjects it to the same scrutiny as express non-compete agreements.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
employment_116: Interaction of Workers' Compensation with Disability and Leave Laws (The Law Mind Employment & Labor Law Encyclopedia)
contracts_205: Employment Contracts — Garden Leave Clauses and Paid Non-Compete Periods (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)