Definition
A naked power is a power of appointment or disposition granted to a person — the donee — who has no interest of their own in the property over which the power is exercised. The donee acts purely as an agent of the grantor's intent, holding authority to direct or transfer an interest without holding or acquiring any beneficial stake in that interest. Because the donee has no property interest before the power is created and acquires none by virtue of the instrument creating it, the power is described as "naked" or "bare" — stripped of the personal interest that would otherwise attend it.
Naked power is distinguished from a power coupled with an interest, in which the donee holds some independent property right in the subject matter alongside the authority to act. That distinction carries significant legal consequences: a naked power is generally revocable by the grantor and terminates upon the grantor's death, while a power coupled with an interest typically survives the grantor and cannot be unilaterally revoked.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Naked" in ordinary English means unclothed, exposed, or bare; by extension, lacking some expected covering or qualification.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's uses "naked" to mean "bare," "destitute of," or "without addition" — as in a naked assertion, meaning one unsupported by evidence or qualification.
The ordinary sense of "naked" as simply "bare" or "unadorned" captures part of the legal meaning but obscures the precise technical content. In legal usage, what is absent is not ornamentation but property interest — the donee's lack of any stake in the subject matter is the operative fact, not mere simplicity or lack of formality.
Common Confusion
Naked power is frequently confused with power coupled with an interest. The terms occupy opposite ends of a spectrum but are sometimes conflated in older documents that use "power" loosely. A power coupled with an interest requires that the donee hold an actual interest in the property itself — not merely an interest in the proceeds or in performing the act. Researchers should also distinguish naked power from a bare power, a term used interchangeably in many sources, and from a collateral power, which historical dictionaries treat as largely synonymous but which some authorities distinguish based on how the power was created rather than whether any interest exists in the donee.
Why It Matters in Research
Naked power appears primarily in the law of powers of appointment and in agency law. Researchers navigating older equity and property materials should note several traps:
First, terminology is inconsistent across historical sources. "Naked power," "bare power," and "collateral power" are used interchangeably in some authorities and distinguished in others. Black's own historical entry cites Caines' Cases and uses "simply collateral" as a near-synonym — a signal that nineteenth-century American courts treated the terms as overlapping.
Second, the revocability consequence is the research fulcrum. Cases turning on whether an agency was terminated by death of the principal, or whether a trust power survived its creator, depend entirely on whether the power was naked or coupled with an interest. Researchers following a chain of authority on agency termination or trust administration will frequently need to resolve this characterization before the outcome of any case makes sense.
Third, in modern trust law, the concept has been substantially absorbed into the vocabulary of powers of appointment — general, special, testamentary — and the older "naked power" framing appears less often in contemporary statutes and restatements. Researchers using modern secondary sources may find the term absent while the underlying doctrine persists under different labels.
Fourth, the term appears in intellectual property licensing, particularly in trademark law, under the label "naked licensing" — a distinct doctrine governing licensor control over licensee quality. That usage borrows the "naked" vocabulary to describe a license stripped of adequate oversight, but it is analytically unrelated to the property-law concept of naked power. See ENCYCLOPEDIA CROSS-REFERENCE.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines naked power as one "simply collateral and without interest in the donee, which arises when, to a mere stranger, authority is given of disposing of an interest, in which he had not before, nor has by the instrument creating the power, any estate whatsoever," citing Caines' Cases. This formulation captures the core doctrine cleanly: the donee is a stranger to the interest, before and after.
The emphasis on "mere stranger" is significant. Historical equity courts treated the stranger status as both a descriptive and a normative marker — it explained why the power lapsed at the grantor's death (the donee had no continuing stake to enforce) and why it could not survive revocation (no interest underwrote the authority). Older English authorities, particularly in the Chancery tradition, used this framing to police the boundary between agency and property, ensuring that executory powers did not become back-channel property transfers.
What historical dictionaries tend to understate is the procedural significance: courts in equity were frequently asked whether a donee who had exercised a naked power had done so validly after a triggering event (death, incapacity, revocation) — and the entire analysis rested on correctly characterizing the power at the outset. Historical entries provide the definition but rarely illuminate the litigation context in which the distinction was actually litigated.
Jurisdictional Note
The doctrine is primarily relevant in states with developed trust and estates jurisprudence and in jurisdictions that have codified powers of appointment. Modern Uniform Trust Code states have largely absorbed the relevant distinctions into statutory frameworks that use different vocabulary. Researchers working in pre-codification materials should apply the historical common law framing; researchers in modern trust administration should cross-check whether the jurisdiction's applicable statute has displaced common law characterization rules.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Trademark Abandonment and Naked Licensing (The Law Mind Intellectual Property Encyclopedia) — for the distinct "naked licensing" doctrine in trademark law, which borrows the vocabulary of "nakedness" to describe licensee quality control failures unrelated to the property-law concept addressed here.
Congressional Power — Enumerated Powers and the Necessary and Proper Clause (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia) — tangentially relevant when researching the historical usage of "power" as a term of art in public law contexts, though the constitutional usage is analytically distinct from the private law doctrine of naked power.