Definition
The person who receives a mandate — that is, the party to whom a charge, command, or commission is given to perform an act, typically on behalf of another. In legal usage, the term operates in two distinct contexts:
1. Bailment and agency law. A mandatary is one who undertakes to perform a specific act or service for another (the mandator or mandant) without compensation. Because the service is gratuitous, the mandatary is the defining characteristic of a mandate as a species of bailment: the absence of reward distinguishes the relationship from a paid agency or hire of service. The mandatary must perform the task as instructed but is generally held only to a standard of ordinary care, given the gratuitous nature of the undertaking.
2. Ecclesiastical and benefice law. In older English and canon law usage, a mandatary was the recipient of a papal or royal mandate directing that a specific ecclesiastical benefice be conferred upon that person. This sense is largely historical and confined to pre-Reformation and early modern legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who receives a mandate.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One to whom a command or charge is given; specifically, a person to whom the pope has given a mandate for a benefice; also, one who undertakes a specific business commission.
The common and legal definitions are not dramatically opposed, but the ordinary English usage treats "mandatary" as essentially synonymous with "mandatory" (the adjective or noun form). In law, however, mandatary carries precise technical weight in the law of bailment, signaling a gratuitous agency relationship with specific duties and liability rules that "mandatory" as a common word does not convey.
Common Confusion
Mandatary is frequently confused with mandatory. Both derive from the same Latin root, but they are different parts of speech doing different work. Mandatory (adjective) means required or obligatory. Mandatary (noun) means the recipient of a mandate. In older legal writing, mandatory also appeared as a noun synonymous with mandatary, and the two were used interchangeably by some authorities — including Webster's 1913. Modern legal drafting prefers mandatary for the noun to avoid ambiguity. Researchers encountering "mandatory" as a noun in historical sources should read it as mandatary.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in agency law, bailment, or contract history will encounter mandatary most often in treatises predating the twentieth century, when the Roman law categories of bailment — mandate, deposit, commodatum, pledge — were still discussed as distinct legal institutions. American courts largely absorbed mandate into general agency doctrine during the nineteenth century, which means that later sources may describe the same relationship without using the term mandatary at all. A researcher who searches only for "agent" or "bailee" may miss the earlier case law and treatise commentary organized around the mandatary/mandator framework.
The Briggs v. Spaulding citation in Black's 2nd Edition (141 U.S. 132) is a real Supreme Court case dealing with bank director liability — not a mandate case in the classical sense — and its presence in that entry is primarily illustrative of the definitional proposition, not a substantive ruling on mandatary doctrine. Researchers should not treat it as controlling authority on the legal duties of a mandatary.
The ecclesiastical meaning (benefice by mandamus) is almost exclusively relevant to legal history, canon law research, and disputes over pre-Reformation church property. It will appear in English Year Books, ecclesiastical court records, and commentary on canon law but is vestigial in modern civil law contexts.
In civil law jurisdictions — particularly Louisiana and Quebec, which retained Roman-derived private law — mandatary remains an active technical term in codified mandate provisions. Researchers moving between common law and civil law sources must be alert to this: what a common law source calls an "agent acting gratuitously" may be precisely what a civil law source calls a mandatary, but the statutory frameworks governing each differ substantially.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in general agreement on the core meaning. Black's (both editions) and Burrill converge on the definition as the recipient of a mandate or charge. Burrill is the most substantively useful of the shelf sources here, explicitly connecting the term to the law of bailment and the requirement of gratuitousness, and citing Kent's Commentaries (2 Kent's Com. 569–570) — a reliable authority for the classical American treatment of the subject. Anderson's entry is unhelpfully thin, cross-referencing only to MANDATE without adding independent content.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is any treatment of the mandatary's standard of care or the consequences of negligent performance — questions that were live in the treatise literature. Burrill gestures toward the personal property bailment context but does not develop the liability framework. Researchers needing doctrine rather than definition must go beyond the shelf dictionaries to Kent, Story's Commentaries on the Law of Bailments, or the civil law treatises.
The ecclesiastical meaning, noted in both Black's editions, reflects a usage that was already archaic by the time these dictionaries were compiled. Its inclusion is a marker of the dictionaries' debt to English common law sources stretching back to Cowell and Ayliffe rather than evidence of living legal usage.
Jurisdictional Note
In Louisiana and other civil law jurisdictions, mandatary is a statutory term with defined rights and duties codified in civil code provisions on mandate. In common law states, the concept survives but the vocabulary largely does not — the relationship is described in agency or contract terms without reference to mandatary as a formal category.