Definition
To formally name or designate a person for an office, appointment, privilege, or position. In legal usage, to nominate is to put forward a candidate for selection or confirm a name for a specific purpose — it is the act of proposing, not the act of appointing. The nomination creates no vested right or entitlement in the nominee; it is a preliminary step that, if accepted or confirmed by the appropriate authority, ripens into an appointment.
In contract and commercial contexts, a nominating party may designate a third party to receive performance, take delivery, or act in a specified capacity under the terms of an agreement. This usage appears most frequently in shipping, trade finance, and agency arrangements, where one party holds the right to name another who will step into a defined role.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "A nominee."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To name or designate by name for an office or place; to appoint; especially, to name as a candidate for election, choice, or appointment; to propose by name. Earlier senses included simply to mention by name, to call, to entitle, or to set down in express terms — all marked as obsolete by 1913.
The gap between common and legal usage is one of precision, not kind. Ordinary English treats nominate and appoint as near-synonyms, and in casual speech a nominated person is often assumed to hold or be on the verge of holding a position. Legal usage is stricter: nomination and appointment are formally distinct acts. A nomination is the proposal; appointment is the conferral of authority. Conflating them can matter enormously in administrative law, constitutional interpretation, and contract disputes over who holds binding power to act.
Common Confusion
Nominate vs. Appoint: The two terms are frequently used interchangeably in everyday speech but carry distinct legal weight. To nominate is to propose or designate; to appoint is to vest with office or authority. In constitutional and administrative contexts, these steps may be held by different actors — a nominating party may lack the power to appoint, and the nominee acquires no legal status until appointment is complete and, where required, confirmed. Sources that use the terms interchangeably should be read carefully to determine which legal act is actually meant.
Nominate vs. Elect: Nomination precedes election and does not guarantee it. A nominated candidate has been put forward through a formal or informal process; an elected official has been chosen by a qualifying vote or decision. Research touching political or corporate governance contexts should track whether a source means the act of proposing or the act of choosing.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in constitutional law, administrative law, or corporate governance should pay close attention to how historical sources use nominate. The word has narrowed considerably in legal precision over time: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts often use nominate where modern law would say appoint, and the two words appear interchangeably in older statutes, deeds, and trust instruments. A historical document stating that someone was "nominated" to a position may, in context, mean they were fully appointed — or it may reflect a genuine two-stage process where a confirming authority still had to act.
In shipping and trade practice, nominate appears in a different functional register: a buyer nominates a vessel, or a principal nominates a substitute. This usage is contractual rather than governmental, and it generates its own set of questions about whether the nomination is binding, revocable, or conditional on acceptance. Researchers moving between public law and commercial law sources should be alert to this shift in register.
Bouvier's cross-reference to APPOINT signals that nineteenth-century practice treated the terms as sufficiently related to collapse into a single entry. That conflation is instructive: it means Bouvier-era sources cannot always be relied upon to distinguish them. Black's both first and second edition preserve the same definition nearly verbatim — a rare instance of no evolution between editions — which suggests the term was considered stable but also that neither edition invested heavily in distinguishing it from appointment.
Nominative contract forms (contracts in which parties or objects are named specifically rather than described generically) are a related but distinct concept appearing in civil law systems. Researchers should avoid importing this civil law usage into common law research without flagging the distinction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) defines nominate identically: "To propose for an appointment; to designate for an office, a privilege, a living, etc." The inclusion of "a living" — meaning an ecclesiastical benefice — is a signal of the term's historical breadth in English law, where nomination to a church living was a legally significant act tied to advowson rights. This usage has largely disappeared from American practice but may appear in colonial-era documents and English ecclesiastical law materials in the corpus.
Bouvier simply redirects to APPOINT, treating nominate as insufficiently distinct to warrant its own substantive treatment. This editorial choice reflects the practical conflation of the terms in nineteenth-century American usage, and it means Bouvier is of limited help when the distinction between nomination and appointment is actually at issue.
Webster's 1913 preserves older senses — naming, calling, stating in express terms — that are obsolete in legal usage but that may appear in earlier legal documents, particularly in the sense of "nominating" or "stating" terms in a bond or instrument. The Shakespearean example ("Is it so nominated in the bond?") captures this older usage and appears in texts that legal researchers may encounter in equity and contracts history.
None of the three historical sources addresses the commercial nomination context (vessels, substitutes, beneficiaries), which is a gap. Researchers relying solely on these dictionaries will miss the term's significant presence in shipping law and trade finance.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia — Contracts: Adequacy of Consideration and Nominal Consideration (contracts_7)
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia — Remedies: Nominal Damages (contracts_83)
The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia — Damages and Remedies in Tort: Nominal Damages in Tort (torts_172)
Note: The encyclopedia matches returned are for nominal, not nominate — a word-stem overlap, not a conceptual match. Researchers should treat those entries as unrelated to the act of nomination. No encyclopedia entry in the current corpus directly addresses nominate, nomination, or appointment processes.