Definition
In legal usage, levity refers to a lack of genuine, sincere purpose in bringing a legal action — specifically, the making of a complaint or petition out of frivolousness, inconstancy, or absence of real grievance rather than from a true and earnest cause. The term appears most distinctively in the law of divorce, where early statutes required that a petition for dissolution of marriage not be made "out of levity" — meaning the court had to be satisfied that the petitioner was not seeking divorce on a whim, out of passing displeasure, or for a merely transient or trivial reason.
The precise legal content of the word was never fully settled. Bouvier acknowledges directly that what "levity" means in the statutory context "has never" been definitively resolved — suggesting courts treated it more as a cautionary standard than a precisely enforceable element. In practice, the term functioned as a companion concept to collusion: both pointed toward the absence of good faith, but levity addressed the petitioner's sincerity and steadiness of purpose, while collusion addressed corrupt agreement between the parties.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A lightness of manner or speech; frivolity or flippancy; a lack of appropriate seriousness; an inclination to treat serious matters as jokes. Also, a lack of steadiness, or the physical quality of buoyancy.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The quality of relative lightness or buoyancy, especially as shown by rising through or floating upon a denser substance; opposed to gravity. Also used figuratively for lightness of mind or behavior.
The legal meaning draws on the figurative, behavioral sense of levity — inconstancy, flightiness, want of settled purpose — rather than the physical sense. The gap worth noting is one of degree and context: in ordinary language, levity is often mildly positive or at worst gently critical (comic relief, not taking things too seriously). In its legal use, levity was a disqualifying condition. A petitioner found to be acting out of levity lacked the sincere, weighty grievance the law required. The ordinary connotation of harmless lightness undersells the term's legal gravity.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical divorce records, ecclesiastical court documents, or early American statutory materials will encounter levity as a formal term of art that has since disappeared from modern pleading. Its presence in divorce statutes — particularly under the Act of 1815 framework Bouvier references — marks a period when courts functioned partly as gatekeepers of marital dissolution, requiring affirmative proof that the petition was not collusive, frivolous, or motivated by mere mutual convenience.
Because the term was never given a fixed legal definition (Bouvier himself signals this uncertainty), researchers should not expect to find clear doctrinal tests in case law. Its meaning was largely absorbed into the broader inquiry into good faith and the absence of collusion. When reading historical petitions, libels, or judicial opinions in divorce matters, the pairing of "levity" with "collusion" is a recurring formula — not two independent elements so much as two faces of the same bad-faith inquiry.
The term is essentially extinct in modern divorce law. No-fault divorce regimes eliminated the need for courts to police the sincerity of the petitioner's grievance. Researchers encountering levity in modern legal materials would be looking at either historical quotation, ecclesiastical law influence, or a non-legal register entirely.
One navigational trap: do not confuse the statutory formula "not made out of levity or by collusion" with a two-element conjunctive test. Courts and commentators treated the phrase as a unified expression of the sincerity requirement, not as separate grounds for dismissal to be analyzed independently.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the only historical legal dictionary in the Law Mind corpus to treat levity, and it does so narrowly — quoting the statutory language and immediately conceding that the term's precise meaning was unsettled. This candor is itself historically significant: it suggests that levity in divorce law was a legislative import of a moral and behavioral concept that the courts never successfully operationalized into doctrine.
Bouvier places levity in direct proximity to collusion, which receives a full technical treatment elsewhere in his dictionary. The contrast is instructive: collusion was a known legal concept with defined features; levity was more of a rhetorical and moral standard — a requirement of earnestness — that resisted formal doctrinal elaboration. No competing or clarifying treatment appears in the other major historical dictionaries of the period, which is consistent with the term's marginal and largely formulaic role in legal usage.
Jurisdictional Note
Levity as a formal statutory term in divorce law was primarily a feature of American jurisdictions following early nineteenth-century legislative models, including the Act of 1815 Bouvier cites. Its use was never uniform across states, and it did not develop into a term of art in English common law divorce practice in the same way. Researchers working across jurisdictions should not assume that the same statutory formula — or the same (limited) judicial interpretation — applied uniformly.