Definition
Personable is an archaic legal adjective describing a person or entity that possesses the legal capacity to act in a formal legal capacity. It carries two related but distinct senses:
1. Procedural capacity: Having the status and legal standing to hold or maintain a plea in court — that is, to sue, be sued, or otherwise appear as a party to litigation.
2. Proprietary capacity: Having legal capacity to take or receive a thing granted or given — to be the competent recipient of a grant, gift, bequest, or other legal conveyance.
Both senses reduce to the same underlying concept: the possession of legal personality sufficient to exercise rights or bear obligations recognized by law. In modern terms, the concept is largely absorbed by "legal capacity," "standing," "legal personality," or "capacity to sue."
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Of a person, having a pleasing appearance or attractive qualities; also, having a pleasant and friendly manner.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Having a well-formed body, or person; graceful; comely; of good appearance; presentable." Webster's 1913 also records the legal senses — "enabled to maintain pleas in court" and "having capacity to take anything granted" — as secondary meanings attributed to Cowell.
The gap here is significant. In everyday modern English, "personable" means likeable or attractive in manner or appearance. In legal usage the term has nothing to do with attractiveness or social manner; it is entirely a term of legal capacity. A researcher encountering "personable" in a historical legal text who reads it through the lens of ordinary English will miss the meaning entirely.
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Common Confusion
PERSONABLE vs. PERSONAL: In Plowden's reports, the legal sense of "personable" appears as the two-word phrase "person able," not yet fused into a single adjective. This creates a transcription and interpretation hazard in older manuscript-derived sources. The fused form "personable" and the phrase "person able" should be read identically in legal context. Do not conflate with "personal" (relating to the person, or done in person), which is a distinct and much broader legal term.
PERSONABLE vs. PERSONA STANDI IN JUDICIO: Burrill notes that "personable" likely derives from the Latin phrase persona standi in judicio — the right to stand in court. The two are related but not identical: persona standi refers specifically to the procedural right of appearance, while personable in its proprietary sense extends also to capacity to receive grants. In historical sources they are sometimes used interchangeably; precision requires checking context.
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Why It Matters in Research
"Personable" is a term that belongs almost entirely to early English and colonial-era legal materials. Researchers working in Year Books, Plowden's Commentaries, Coke's works, or early American treatises may encounter it without warning; it has effectively vanished from modern legal vocabulary.
Several navigational points:
First, the term's procedural and proprietary senses overlap but are not identical. When encountered in a pleadings context, the procedural reading (capacity to maintain a plea) is most likely operative. When encountered in a conveyancing or testamentary context, the proprietary reading (capacity to take a grant) applies. Context is the guide.
Second, Burrill traces the proprietary sense specifically to Plowden 27a, where it appears as "person able" rather than a fused compound. Any Law Mind corpus search on "personable" should be supplemented with searches for "person able" and "persona standi" to ensure full coverage of this conceptual territory in older materials.
Third, because the term is an adjective of legal status rather than a term of art for a doctrine or cause of action, it may appear without definition in historical sources that assume reader familiarity. A secondary finding is that the legal incapacity of certain classes — historically, aliens, felons, outlaws, and entities lacking corporate status — was described by their being "not personable." Negative usage in this form is worth watching for, as it signals that a legal actor's capacity is at issue.
Fourth, the concept connects to the broader legal question of juridical personality: which entities, in any given era, could sue, be sued, hold property, and receive grants. The municipal application — captured in the maxim Personae vice fungitur municipium et decuria (towns and boroughs act as if persons) — means the term was also used in early discussions of what we would now call corporate or municipal legal personality.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries largely agree in substance, with minor variations in emphasis.
Black's (both editions) pairs the two senses — pleading capacity and grant-receiving capacity — without prioritizing one over the other, and both editions cite Warner v. Beers for the maxim on municipal personality. The 2nd edition text is marginally cleaner but substantively identical.
Rapalje & Lawrence is the most compressed, tracing both senses to Plowden with no additional elaboration. Useful as confirmation that the Plowden citation is the foundation text.
Burrill is the most analytically rich of the four. He provides the Latin derivation (personabilis, from persona, capacity), links the term to persona standi in judicio, cites Cowell for the pleading-capacity sense, and quotes the Plowden passage at length. Critically, Burrill notes that in the Plowden source "it is used as two words, person able" — an observation the other dictionaries omit. This is the most important historical note for corpus researchers and is not captured by Black's or Rapalje.
What all four sources conspicuously omit: any treatment of the term's later obsolescence or its displacement by modern vocabulary. None flag that "personable" in the legal sense is largely dead by the 19th century, even as they are writing. Webster's 1913 is the only source that explicitly bridges the common and legal meanings, including both in its entry — which itself reflects the word's transitional status.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is essentially pre-jurisdictional in the modern sense. Its operative use is confined to English common law materials and early American sources that drew on English precedent. It does not appear as a term of art in modern U.S. statutory law or in civil law systems.
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