Definition
A unit of linear measurement. In legal contexts, two distinct measures appear depending on subject matter:
1. Statute mile (land mile): 5,280 feet, 1,760 yards, or 8 furlongs. This is the standard measure used in domestic land law, property descriptions, regulatory distances, zoning ordinances, and criminal statutes specifying geographic limits of jurisdiction or exclusion.
2. Nautical mile (geographical mile): 6,080 feet. Used in admiralty, maritime law, shipping regulations, and international conventions concerning territorial waters and navigation. The nautical mile derives from the arc of one minute of latitude on the Earth's surface.
When a legal instrument, statute, or covenant specifies a distance in miles without qualification, courts generally presume the statute mile unless the context is maritime or the document otherwise indicates.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The primary definition offered is a place name (a city in Yunnan, China) — an artifact of the source and not representative of ordinary English usage. In common modern English, a mile is simply a unit of distance equal to 5,280 feet, used in everyday measurement across the United States and, to a diminishing degree, the United Kingdom.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A certain measure of distance, being equivalent in England and the United States to 320 poles or rods, or 5,280 feet."
Editorial note: The gap between common and legal meaning lies not in the statute mile, which is identical in both registers, but in the nautical mile. Ordinary speakers use "mile" to mean the land measure exclusively. Legal and maritime instruments may invoke the nautical mile (6,080 feet) without explicit clarification, creating a meaningful discrepancy that can affect the interpretation of jurisdictional limits, territorial sea boundaries, and shipping contracts.
Common Confusion
Statute mile vs. nautical mile: The two measures differ by 800 feet — roughly 13 percent. In most land-law contexts the distinction is academic. In admiralty, boundary disputes, and international law it is material. Researchers encountering "mile" in pre-20th-century maritime sources should not assume the modern international nautical mile (1,852 meters, standardized in 1929); earlier sources use varying approximations of the geographical mile.
League: Historically used alongside the mile in boundary descriptions and territorial-sea discussions, a league is conventionally three miles (statute or nautical depending on context). The two terms appear interchangeably in some early American and colonial land grants, and confusion between them can produce significant errors in reconstructing historical boundaries.
Why It Matters in Research
Distance specifications embedded in statutes, covenants, and conveyances carry interpretive weight. A covenant restricting a party from operating a competing business "within half a mile" requires knowing which mile was intended and how that measure was understood at the time of drafting. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry flags exactly this issue with a citation to a covenant case (9 Barn. & C. 774), signaling that courts have had to adjudicate what "within half a mile" means in binding agreements.
For researchers working in the Law Mind corpus, several navigational points apply:
- Territorial jurisdiction statutes: Federal and state statutes fixing geographic limits of authority (e.g., exclusion zones, regulatory buffers, jurisdictional boundaries) use the statute mile unless the subject matter is maritime.
- Admiralty and prize law: Sources in this area use the nautical mile, and the figure given varies across historical periods. The 6,080-foot measure in Black's 2nd edition reflects British Admiralty practice; U.S. and international sources may differ slightly.
- Land descriptions and conveyances: Early American deeds sometimes express distances in chains, furlongs, poles, or leagues rather than miles. Understanding the conversion relationships is necessary for accurate reconstruction of historical boundaries.
- Mileage allowances and fee statutes: Witnesses, officers, and parties were historically entitled to mileage fees set by statute. The applicable measure was always the statute mile, but disputes arose over how distances were calculated (as the crow flies vs. traveled road distance).
- Anderson's entry: The Anderson's Dictionary of Law entry retrieved under this term is plainly a misfiled entry concerning the President's constitutional duty to deliver a State of the Union message. It contains no content relevant to the legal definition of mile and should be disregarded. Researchers using digitized versions of Anderson's should be alert to indexing errors of this kind.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in close agreement on the statute mile: 5,280 feet, 1,760 yards, 8 furlongs. Bouvier adds the internal breakdown (8 furlongs of 40 poles each, each pole measuring 16.5 feet), which is useful for researchers reconciling older land descriptions that use those subdivisions. The internal arithmetic (40 × 8 = 320 poles; 320 × 16.5 feet = 5,280 feet) confirms consistency across sources.
Black's 2nd edition is the only historical source in this set to define the nautical mile, giving it as 6,080 feet. The 1st edition of Black's, Bouvier, and Rapalje & Lawrence omit the nautical mile entirely — a notable gap given the importance of that measure in admiralty practice throughout the 19th century. Researchers relying on those sources alone for maritime distance questions would receive an incomplete picture.
None of the historical sources address the distinction between straight-line and road-distance calculations, which became a recurring interpretive problem in covenant cases and fee statutes.
Jurisdictional Note
The statute mile is uniform across U.S. jurisdictions. The nautical mile was standardized internationally at 1,852 meters (approximately 6,076 feet) by the International Hydrographic Conference in 1929 and adopted by the United States in 1954, superseding the older 6,080-foot figure. Researchers working with pre-1954 U.S. admiralty sources should use the 6,080-foot figure; post-1954 sources use 1,852 meters.