Definition
Wrong or improper administration. The term appears in two principal legal contexts:
1. Public administration. Misconduct, incompetence, or improper conduct by a public official in the exercise of governmental duties. In constitutional and political usage, maladministration by an officer of government may constitute grounds for impeachment or removal from office.
2. Estate and trust administration. Mismanagement of an estate, trust, or other fiduciary arrangement by an executor, administrator, or trustee — including waste, misapplication of assets, failure to account, or breach of fiduciary duty. In this context, the term is used interchangeably with misadministration.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Faulty, improper, or inefficient administration or management, especially by a government body; an instance of this.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Bad administration; bad management of any business, especially of public affairs. Also written maleadministration.
The common meaning and the legal meaning align closely, but the legal sources narrow the term in practice. In legal contexts, maladministration carries a more precise technical charge — it implies a breach of duty or violation of a legal standard, not merely poor performance. A court or statute invoking maladministration is not describing inefficiency in the colloquial sense but identifying actionable wrongdoing by a person entrusted with legal authority over others' affairs.
Common Confusion
Maladministration and misadministration are used interchangeably in the historical law books and are treated as synonyms. Researchers should not assume a technical distinction between them — historical sources, including Black's and Bouvier's, explicitly equate the two terms. Both mean "wrong administration." Searching only one form in historical legal databases may cause relevant materials to be missed.
The term should also be distinguished from nonfeasance (failure to act) and misfeasance (improper performance of a lawful act), which are related but not synonymous. Maladministration is broader and does not require the same formal doctrinal analysis those terms carry.
Why It Matters in Research
The term functions in two largely separate bodies of law — public law (constitutional, impeachment, and administrative law contexts) and private law (probate and fiduciary law) — and historical sources rarely signal which body is meant. Researchers must read surrounding context carefully.
In probate and estate records, maladministration appears as a ground for surcharging a fiduciary, removing an executor or administrator, or denying discharge. Historical probate pleadings often use the term without further elaboration, assuming the court understood what misconduct was alleged. Researchers working with older probate records should look for companion filings — accountings, inventories, or petitions to remove — to reconstruct what the maladministration actually consisted of.
In constitutional and political law, the term has a significant historical arc. During debates over the U.S. Constitution's impeachment clause, "maladministration" was considered and rejected as a standard for impeachment in favor of "high crimes and misdemeanors." This history is relevant to any research involving the scope of impeachment and what conduct the Founders understood to be impeachable. The rejection of maladministration as the operative term was deliberate and recorded in Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention.
The spelling variant maleadministration (noted in Webster's 1913) appears occasionally in older sources. Anderson's Dictionary of Law offers no independent definition, directing the reader instead to the component terms MAL and ADMINISTER — a cross-referencing pattern common in that dictionary that signals the editors considered the term self-explanatory from its parts rather than a term of art with independent doctrinal content.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four historical sources agree: maladministration means wrong administration and is interchangeable with misadministration. Black's 1st and 2nd editions, and Bouvier's, each cite the same Nebraska authority — Minkler v. State, 14 Neb. 183 — as the only case support, suggesting the term generated limited appellate litigation in the period these dictionaries covered. The consensus is complete and the definitions are nearly identical across sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the constitutional dimension of the term — its consideration and rejection during the framing of the impeachment clause. This is a significant gap for public law researchers. The dictionaries treat maladministration as a neutral descriptive term rather than as a term with a contested constitutional history.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the least independent content, relying entirely on component definitions. Researchers relying solely on Anderson's for this term will need to supplement with Black's or Bouvier's to understand its legal application.
Jurisdictional Note
In English administrative law and in the law of Commonwealth jurisdictions, maladministration carries a more developed technical meaning, particularly in the context of ombudsman statutes, where it is a defined statutory trigger for investigation. U.S. sources use the term more loosely. Researchers working with English or Commonwealth materials from the mid-twentieth century onward will find a richer doctrinal framework built around the term than exists in American legal sources.