Definition
MAJOR carries two distinct legal meanings: one relating to personal legal status, the other to military rank.
1. Person of Full Age. A major is a person who has attained the age of legal adulthood — full legal capacity to manage their own affairs, enter binding contracts, exercise civic rights, and bear the full range of legal responsibilities. The opposite of a minor. The precise age threshold is set by statute and varies by jurisdiction, though 18 is now standard throughout the United States following legislative reforms in the 1970s.
2. Military Rank. In military law, a major is a commissioned officer ranking immediately above a captain and immediately below a lieutenant colonel.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Primarily encountered today as a verb phrase ("to major in") indicating a field of academic concentration, and as an adjective meaning large, important, or significant.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Greater in number, quantity, or extent"; "of greater dignity; more important"; and, notably marked obsolete even by 1913 — "of full legal age."
The gap is instructive: the legal sense of major as a person of full age was already archaic in common English by the early twentieth century, though it persisted in legal dictionaries and formal legal instruments considerably longer. Researchers encountering major in nineteenth-century legal documents should not assume the adjectival meaning of "greater" or "important" — the personal status meaning is the operative one in private law contexts.
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Common Confusion
MAJOR vs. ADULT: In modern usage these are functionally synonymous, but the terminology shifted. Older legal instruments, particularly those of civilian-law influence, preferred major; modern statutes and case law overwhelmingly use adult or person of majority. Researchers tracing contractual capacity disputes across a long time span may encounter both without noticing the terminological shift.
MAJOR vs. MAJORITY: These are related but distinct. Major is the person; majority is the legal status or the age threshold itself. Historical sources sometimes use major loosely where majority is technically meant, and vice versa. See MAJORITY for the doctrine governing when and how that threshold is reached, altered, or waived.
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Why It Matters in Research
The personal-status meaning of major is largely a term of historical legal sources. Modern statutes, court opinions, and legal instruments in the United States rarely use major to mean an adult — they use adult, person of majority, or reference the age of majority directly. Researchers working with nineteenth-century contracts, wills, equity proceedings, or civil-law-influenced materials (Louisiana especially) will encounter major frequently in this sense and must read it correctly.
Burrill's entry is particularly valuable for its Latin-law dimension. The Roman law distinction between those above and below twenty-five years of age (major annis viginti quinque) was foundational to early American and colonial law, and Burrill rightly notes that major, unlike minor, was never fully naturalized into common-law English usage. This means the term carries civilian-law freight that common-law researchers may not immediately recognize.
The Latin maxims recorded in Burrill — major numerus in se continet minorem (the greater number contains the lesser) — appear in a completely separate doctrinal context: property law, agency, and numerical sufficiency questions. Researchers should be alert to the fact that MAJOR appears in historical sources in both the personal-status sense and as a pure Latin comparative adjective meaning "the greater," and these two uses are entirely unrelated.
The military rank meaning is stable and poses no interpretive difficulty in modern sources, but may require attention in historical court-martial records and military pension documents where rank designations affect entitlements.
The "major questions doctrine" in administrative and constitutional law — prominent after West Virginia v. EPA (2022) — is a separate and unrelated usage. It derives from the adjectival meaning of major (significant, important) and has no connection to the personal-status or military-rank definitions. Researchers should not conflate these.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core personal-status definition: a person of full age, no longer a minor, possessed of their civil rights. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's are nearly identical on this point, reflecting a shared derivation from common legal usage of the period.
Bouvier adds a useful cross-reference to MAJORITY and to MAXIMS, correctly treating major as a gateway term rather than a fully self-contained entry. This editorial judgment is sound — the substantive doctrine lives in majority, and major functions mainly as a label.
Burrill stands apart in depth. His entry surfaces the Roman-law foundation, the twenty-five year threshold from the Digest, and the Latin maxims in which major appears as a comparative adjective rather than a status designation. He also makes the candid observation that major "has not, like minor, been adopted" into English legal usage — a historically accurate point that explains why minor survived into modern legal language while major did not.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the doctrinal content governing how one becomes a major — the age threshold, emancipation, statutory modifications — is largely absent. These entries treat major as definitional rather than doctrinal. For the operative law, researchers must move to majority, emancipation, and the relevant statutory frameworks.
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Jurisdictional Note
The personal-status meaning of major as a civil-law term retains more vitality in Louisiana than in other American jurisdictions, owing to Louisiana's civilian heritage. Louisiana Civil Code provisions historically used major and minor in their French and civil-law senses. In all other U.S. jurisdictions, adult or person of majority is the operative modern terminology.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Child Support — Duration of Support Obligation (Emancipation, Age of Majority) (The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia): covers the threshold at which a person becomes a major and the legal consequences that follow, including termination of parental support obligations.
SCOTUS Environmental Decisions — Sackett, West Virginia v. EPA, and Major Questions (The Law Mind Environmental & Energy Law Encyclopedia): covers the major questions doctrine in administrative law — a separate and unrelated use of the word major, included here to help researchers distinguish doctrinal contexts.
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