Definition
An instrument used to measure a quantity — such as gas, water, electricity, coal, or land — typically in a commercial or regulatory context. In legal usage, the term appears most often in utility regulation, taxation, public works, and trade law, where accurate measurement of a commodity is a predicate to billing, taxation, or contract performance. A meter may also refer to the act of measuring or regulating flow, as in metered billing or metered access.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To measure with a metering device; to imprint postage with a postage meter; to regulate the flow of fluids or other quantities in controlled amounts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An instrument for measuring and usually automatically recording quantities, such as gas or water, including dry meters with flexible chambers and wet meters using a chambered drum in water.
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but real. In ordinary English, "meter" encompasses physical rhythm and poetic cadence, as well as the metric unit of length. In legal sources, neither meaning typically appears — legal usage is almost exclusively confined to measurement instruments and the regulatory or commercial obligations that attach to them. A researcher encountering "meter" in a legal document should set aside the metric-length meaning unless the context is explicitly one of international standards, weights-and-measures statutes, or scientific evidence.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Coal-meter: Historically, an official or licensed measurer of coal at docks and wharves, a public office in English and early American port law. The term blends the instrument sense with an officer sense.
Gas-meter: An instrument measuring volume of gas consumed; appears extensively in utility franchise agreements, municipal ordinances, and rate cases.
Land-meter: One who measures land; used in older conveyancing and survey contexts, overlapping with the surveyor's function.
Postage meter: Appears in postal regulations and commercial mail-handling law; a device licensed to imprint prepaid postage, with legal significance for proof of mailing.
Water meter: Central to municipal water utility regulation, billing disputes, and landlord-tenant law where submetering is at issue.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "meter" in at least three distinct legal contexts, and conflating them produces research errors.
First, in utility and public service law, the meter is the physical and legal predicate for consumption billing. Disputes over meter accuracy, meter tampering, back-billing for metered periods, and the evidentiary weight of meter readings are recurring issues in administrative and civil courts. A meter reading is typically presumed accurate, but that presumption is rebuttable, and the rules governing the burden vary by jurisdiction and regulatory tariff.
Second, in historical English and American commercial law, "coal-meter" and similar terms denoted a licensed public official, not merely a device. Early American port statutes adopted this English usage. A researcher working in pre-industrial commercial records must determine whether "meter" means a person holding a public office or a mechanical instrument — the two meanings overlap chronologically.
Third, in weights-and-measures law, statutes governing legal metrology use "meter" to mean the SI unit of length. These statutes appear in the same statutory titles as laws governing commercial measuring instruments. Care is needed to avoid reading metric-length provisions into instrument-regulation provisions and vice versa.
The term also surfaces in landlord-tenant and condominium law through submetering disputes — where a building owner installs individual meters for tenants and bills directly — and in evidence law, where automated meter records are offered as business records or as electronic device output, raising authentication and reliability questions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary, both the first and second editions, gives an identical and minimal entry: "An instrument of measurement; as a coal-meter, a gas-meter, a land-meter." The examples chosen reveal something important about the era. Coal-metering and gas-metering were active regulatory subjects in late nineteenth-century American and English law; the examples are not random illustrations but the live legal controversies of the period. Land-meter points toward survey and conveyancing practice rather than utility regulation.
What the historical dictionaries omit is significant: there is no treatment of the meter as a public officer (the coal-meter in English dock law), no discussion of the presumption of accuracy that attaches to metered readings, and no acknowledgment of the metric unit of length — an omission that was defensible in the 1890s when American legal usage of the SI meter was minimal but that becomes a gap in any modern reliance on these sources. Webster's 1913 is more technically detailed on the instrument types but equally silent on the officer meaning.
Neither Black's edition addresses the regulatory consequences of meter tampering, the legal effect of meter readings in contract or rate disputes, or the administrative law framework that would come to dominate metering issues in the twentieth century.
Jurisdictional Note
Utility metering is heavily regulated at the state level through public utility commissions, meaning that rules on meter accuracy, testing intervals, billing disputes, and back-billing caps vary considerably across jurisdictions. Submetering of residential tenants is permitted in some states and prohibited or restricted in others. Researchers should not assume a uniform national standard for any legal proposition tied to meter readings or metering obligations.