Definition
Perquisites (singular: perquisite) carries two related but distinct legal meanings that have narrowed considerably over time.
1. In the broadest historical sense: anything acquired by a person's own industry or purchase, as distinguished from property received by inheritance or descent from an ancestor. Under this usage, perquisites described the category of self-acquired property — a conceptual division with consequences for inheritance, dower, and feudal tenure.
2. In the narrower and more practically durable sense: incidental profits, gains, or benefits that attach to an office, position, or employment, beyond and above the fixed salary, fee, or stated compensation. These are benefits that flow from the position itself — customarily enjoyed, often informally established, and not always reduced to a formal contractual term.
In modern usage, the second meaning dominates almost entirely, both in law and in ordinary speech. The first meaning survives mainly in historical and feudal property law contexts.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of perquisite; commonly used to mean extra benefits or privileges that come with a job or position, often shortened colloquially to "perks."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Perquisites were understood as casual emoluments, fees, or profits attached to an office or position, beyond regular wages — closely tracking the narrower legal definition even in ordinary speech.
The gap between common and legal meaning is modest in the modern period, but researchers should note that the legal term historically carried the additional, broader meaning relating to self-acquired property versus inherited property. A historical source using "perquisites" in a property or conveyancing context may not be referring to employment benefits at all — a distinction that Webster's 1913 and modern common usage both obscure.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
1. Feudal perquisites of a manor: Casual profits accruing to a lord through his court-baron — fines, amercements, and forfeitures — distinct from the fixed annual yield of the land. These were irregular and incident-based rather than fixed.
2. Perquisites of office: Benefits flowing to a public officer or officeholder by virtue of the position — fees, gratuities, use of property, or other customary advantages beyond statutory salary.
3. Employment perquisites (modern): Non-wage compensation provided to employees — company vehicles, housing allowances, expense accounts, stock options, and similar benefits. In tax law and employment law, this category has developed its own dense body of regulatory treatment.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term bifurcates across time and subject matter, and researchers who encounter it in historical sources must determine which meaning is operative before drawing conclusions.
In feudal and early common law property sources, perquisites appears in discussions of inheritance and seisin. Bracton's usage — cited in both Black's and Bouvier's — treats perquisites as the counterpart to inheritance: property a man holds by his own act rather than by descent. This distinction had real legal consequences for what passed to heirs and what a widow could claim as dower. Modern researchers reading back into these sources through the lens of the employment-benefit meaning will misread the passage entirely.
In public law and administrative sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perquisites of office was a contested concept. Courts and legislatures periodically debated whether informal emoluments of office were legally protected incidents of the position or revocable gratuities. Researchers tracing the history of public officer compensation should treat "perquisites" as a technical term of art requiring contextual analysis.
In modern employment, tax, and corporate governance research, the term functions almost as a term of art for non-cash and non-wage compensation. Executive perquisites have been a focus of SEC disclosure rules and corporate governance reform. Here the corpus connections run to compensation disclosure, proxy statement analysis, and IRS fringe benefit regulations — not to feudal property or manorial courts.
The historical dictionaries are of genuine but limited use. Black's first edition entry is partially garbled in the available text but preserves the dual-meaning structure. Bouvier's is the most useful historical source for this term, clearly articulating both the broad property-law meaning and the narrower office-benefit meaning in a single entry.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the clearest and most structurally complete historical definition, explicitly distinguishing the two senses: the broad sense (anything acquired by industry or purchase, as opposed to inheritance) and the limited sense (gains beyond regular salary or fees from a place or office). Bouvier cites Bracton directly for the broad meaning, grounding the term in medieval common law property theory.
Black's Law Dictionary (1st Ed.) tracks Bouvier's structure and adds the feudal manorial dimension explicitly — perquisites of a court-baron as casual profits over and above annual land income, irregular in nature. The reference to Mozley & Whitley's law dictionary indicates this was well-established vocabulary in English legal practice.
The Black's 2nd Ed. source material provided does not contain a usable entry for this term — the text supplied corresponds to an unrelated entry (likely perpetual edict or perpetual succession). Researchers should not treat the 2nd Ed. as a gap in coverage; it is a data artifact.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the modern regulatory elaboration of perquisites in employment and tax law. Neither Black's nor Bouvier's anticipates the treatment of perquisites as a category of taxable income, the SEC's executive compensation disclosure framework, or corporate governance debates over perquisite abuse. Researchers working in these areas must move beyond the historical dictionaries entirely.
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Jurisdictional Note
In U.S. federal tax law, perquisites to employees are generally treated as taxable income unless a specific exclusion applies under the Internal Revenue Code. In English law, the term retains more explicit historical resonance in discussions of Crown officers and judicial emoluments. Researchers working in Commonwealth jurisdictions should expect the term to carry stronger echoes of its public-office meaning than is typical in modern American legal usage.
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