Definition
"Meanors" is not a standalone legal term. It appears exclusively as the tail fragment of the compound term MISDEMEANORS — most commonly encountered in the constitutional phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors." In historical legal texts, particularly those printed in condensed or alphabetically indexed form, the fragment "meanors" sometimes appears as a cross-reference stub or truncated index entry directing the reader to the full term.
For the substantive legal definition, see MISDEMEANORS and HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS.
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Common Confusion
Do not conflate "meanors" (a fragment) with any of the following, each of which carries independent legal meaning:
MISDEMEANOR — a criminal offense below the grade of felony.
HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS — the constitutional standard for impeachment of federal officers.
DEMEANOR — an entirely distinct term referring to the bearing or conduct of a witness as observed by a fact-finder, relevant to credibility assessments.
The visual similarity between "meanors" and "demeanor" occasionally produces confusion in OCR-processed texts. These terms share no legal relationship.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in digitized historical legal corpora — including scanned editions of Bouvier's Law Dictionary and similar nineteenth-century reference works — will occasionally encounter "meanors" as an artifact of typesetting, line breaks, or alphabetical indexing conventions. Optical character recognition (OCR) errors in digitized sources can also produce "meanors" as a standalone token when the prefix "mis" or "demis" is dropped or misread.
The Bouvier entry captured in the source material above is itself a fragment: it begins mid-discussion of the constitutional impeachment clause and breaks off before completing its citation string ("See 6 —"). This is characteristic of compressed dictionary formats where cross-references substitute for full treatment. A researcher who encounters "meanors" as an apparent headword in a historical source should treat it as a pointer, not a definition, and navigate immediately to the full compound term.
The substantive constitutional question — what conduct qualifies as a "high crime and misdemeanor" for purposes of impeachment — is one of the most contested interpretive questions in American constitutional law and is addressed fully under HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary uses "meanors" only in the truncated context reproduced above. The entry is plainly a fragment of a longer discussion of the impeachment clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article II, Section 4), referencing historical impeachment proceedings including those of Senator William Blount (1798), Judge James H. Peck (1831), and Justice Samuel Chase (1804). The trailing citation — "See 6" — is incomplete and cannot be resolved without access to the specific edition consulted.
No historical legal dictionary in the standard reference canon treats "meanors" as an independent term. Its appearance as a headword is an artifact of editorial convention or physical damage to the source, not a reflection of any distinct legal concept.
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