Definition
Permission is the grant of authority to do an act that would otherwise be unlawful, impermissible, or subject to restriction. It is the affirmative allowance — express or implied — by a person or authority who has the power to forbid.
In property law, permission is the foundational concept distinguishing a license from a trespass and, critically, from an easement. A landowner's permission to enter or use land creates a license — revocable, personal, and not an interest in land. Without that permission, the same entry is a trespass.
In administrative and regulatory law, permission operates as formal governmental authorization — a permit, license, or clearance — allowing conduct that would otherwise be prohibited by statute or regulation.
In general civil law, permission functions as a defense-negating concept: one who acts with the permission of the right-holder cannot be held liable for the act that permission covered.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To grant or obtain authorization for.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of permitting or allowing; formal consent; authorization; leave; license or liberty granted.
The common and legal meanings are largely aligned in concept, but the legal stakes are far higher. In ordinary speech, permission is social or relational — something asked and given between individuals, easily revoked or forgotten. In law, permission carries structural weight: it determines whether conduct is lawful or tortious, whether a property interest has been created, and whether a statute has been satisfied. The casual informality implied by everyday usage can mislead researchers examining historical disputes where the presence or absence of documented permission controls the entire legal question.
Common Confusion
Permission is frequently conflated with two related but distinct concepts:
License vs. easement: A permission-based license grants use of land but creates no property interest. An easement does. The distinction matters acutely in property disputes: permissive use, however long-standing, does not ripen into an easement by prescription in most jurisdictions — it remains revocable. Researchers examining land use disputes must determine at the outset whether the use was permissive or claimed as of right.
Permission vs. consent: In tort and criminal law, consent and permission overlap but are not interchangeable. Consent typically refers to a party's agreement to an act affecting themselves (e.g., in battery, medical treatment, sexual conduct). Permission is more often used when a third-party authority figure — a property owner, a government — authorizes conduct affecting others or a protected interest. The distinction is terminological but can affect which legal doctrine governs the analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
The most consequential research trap involving permission arises in adverse possession and prescriptive easement cases. Permissive use — use with the landowner's permission — defeats a prescriptive easement claim because prescriptive use must be hostile or under claim of right. Historical sources that document neighborly accommodation or informal land use arrangements may be recording permissive use without using the word. Researchers must read for the substance of the relationship, not the label.
In immigration research, "permissible activities" is a term of art tied to specific visa classifications. What a B-2 tourist visa permits versus what requires separate authorization is highly fact-specific and subject to agency interpretation. The Immigration Law Encyclopedia entry on B-1/B-2 visas provides navigational context here.
In administrative law, researchers should distinguish between general statutory authorization (the legislature permitting a class of acts) and specific regulatory permission (an agency approving a particular act). Historical sources often blur this distinction.
Bouvier's observation that permission is "a check upon the operations of the law" is theoretically interesting: permission operates as a carve-out from a background of prohibition. This framing is useful when analyzing regulatory schemes — understanding what is prohibited by default clarifies what a grant of permission actually does.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources converge on the same core definition: permission is a license to do an act that would otherwise be unlawful. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier are verbatim on this point, which reflects the term's stability as a legal concept across the period these dictionaries cover.
Bouvier adds the most analytically useful gloss, citing Rutherforth's Institutes of Natural Law for the proposition that permission "differs from a law" and operates as "a negation of law arising either from the law's silence or its express declaration." This distinction between express permission (an affirmative grant derogating from a prior prohibition) and implied permission (arising from the law's silence) is underused in modern analysis but remains meaningful — particularly in property and regulatory contexts where the absence of prohibition is sometimes treated as authorization.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural dimension of permission in modern administrative law, the role of permission in intellectual property licensing, and the immigration-specific sense of permissible activity under visa classifications. Researchers working in these areas should not rely on the historical dictionary entries as definitive.
Jurisdictional Note
In adverse possession and prescriptive easement doctrine, how permission is established and whether it can be implied varies significantly by jurisdiction. Some states hold that a landowner's acquiescence in use is not permission absent affirmative conduct; others treat long acquiescence as implied permission defeating prescriptiveness. Researchers should not assume uniform treatment across jurisdictions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Licenses — Revocable Permission and Distinction from Easements (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia)
Easements — Scope of Easements: Permissible Use, Expansion, Overuse (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia)
B-1/B-2 Visitor Visas — Business Visitors, Tourists, and Permissible Activities (The Law Mind Immigration Law Encyclopedia)