Definition
A pauper is a person so destitute of means as to be incapable of supporting themselves and dependent upon public or private charity for subsistence. The term carries two distinct but related legal meanings:
1. Public welfare sense: A person without sufficient means of self-support, historically subject to the jurisdiction of poor law authorities and entitled to public relief at the expense of the parish, county, or state.
2. Procedural sense: A litigant who, on account of poverty, is permitted by a court to sue or defend an action without being required to pay court costs, fees, or security. This procedural status is formalized in modern law under the doctrine of in forma pauperis.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To make a pauper of; to drive into poverty. (Note: Wiktionary's primary entry treats the word as a verb, reflecting modern informal usage.)
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A poor person; especially, one dependent on private or public charity.
The common meaning and the legal meaning are closer here than with many legal terms, but the gap is real. In ordinary speech, pauper is an informal, often pejorative label for any very poor person. In law, pauper is — or historically was — a term of art with administrative and procedural consequences: it determined eligibility for public relief, fixed the obligation of specific governmental bodies to provide support, and granted specific rights within litigation. A person colloquially called a pauper might or might not meet the formal legal threshold. The procedural meaning (in forma pauperis) has largely displaced the welfare-status meaning in modern American practice.
Common Confusion
Pauper and indigent are frequently used interchangeably in both legal writing and common speech, but they are not always synonymous. In modern criminal procedure, indigent is the preferred term for a defendant entitled to appointed counsel. In civil procedure, in forma pauperis status is the operative concept, though courts sometimes use pauper as shorthand. In historical poor law sources — particularly English law and early American statutes — pauper carries a distinct administrative meaning tied to settlement, removal, and relief obligations that neither indigent nor in forma pauperis fully captures. Researchers should not assume that occurrences of pauper in historical sources signal a procedural or constitutional question; they may instead signal a poor-law or public-charge question.
Why It Matters in Research
The word pauper does significant work in at least three distinct bodies of law across the Law Mind corpus, and conflating them produces research errors.
First, in English and early American poor law materials, pauper is a status term with administrative teeth. Parish settlement laws, removal statutes, and overseers-of-the-poor records use pauper to identify those legally chargeable to a particular jurisdiction. Researchers working in this area must track not just poverty as a fact but pauper as a legal determination by an official body. The obligations ran to specific towns or counties, not to the state generally, and disputes about which jurisdiction was liable generated substantial litigation.
Second, in procedural law, pauper appears in early American statutes and rules as the precursor to what is now called in forma pauperis status. Older codes and digests may index poverty-based litigation privileges under pauper rather than under in forma pauperis. A researcher looking only for the modern term may miss the historical lineage.
Third, in immigration and public benefits law, the related concept of public charge — a person likely to become dependent on public support — evolved out of the pauper tradition. Immigration statutes historically barred entry to paupers and persons likely to become public charges, and the two concepts shade into each other in nineteenth and early twentieth century materials.
When reading historical sources, also watch for dispauper, a verb meaning to strip a litigant of pauper status — typically when it was discovered that the party had sufficient means after all. This term appears in the 2nd edition of Black's and in English practice materials; it has no modern counterpart in name but the underlying procedure survives in motions to revoke in forma pauperis status.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree on the core meaning and diverge mainly in emphasis and detail.
Burrill's Law Dictionary offers the most concise formulation, defining pauper as a Latin-rooted term meaning a poor person — one who lacks the means to defray the expenses of a suit — and immediately cross-referencing in forma pauperis. This signals that Burrill treats the procedural dimension as the primary legal interest.
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) explicitly carries both the welfare and the procedural meanings, stating the definition as a person so poor as to require public support, and also a suitor allowed to sue or defend without being chargeable with costs. The 2nd edition adds the entry for dispauper, which the 1st edition does not feature as prominently, suggesting growing practical relevance of that concept by the early twentieth century.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law approaches the term from the Latin adjective pauper (meaning having little, indigent, needy) and treats it primarily as a modifier appearing in the phrase in forma pauperis rather than as a standalone noun of legal significance. This reflects a different editorial judgment about where the term's real legal work gets done.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the poor law dimension — the complex English and American statutory apparatus governing settlement, removal, and relief of paupers as a class. Researchers working in that area will find the dictionary definitions insufficient scaffolding and should turn to encyclopedia and treatise sources directly.
Jurisdictional Note
In modern American law, the procedural concept has been federalized and standardized: 28 U.S.C. § 1915 governs in forma pauperis proceedings in federal courts, and every state has an analogue. The welfare-status meaning of pauper has been largely superseded by modern public benefits law. In English legal history, and in American jurisdictions that incorporated English poor law before the mid-nineteenth century reforms, pauper retains considerable independent significance as an administrative status term.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Poor Laws (for the historical welfare-status meaning and settlement/removal framework); In Forma Pauperis (for the procedural litigation privilege and its modern statutory form); Public Charge (for the immigration law evolution of the concept).