Definition
A place or office of profit in the government is a public position — whether appointive, elective, or otherwise — that carries with it a salary, fee, emolument, or other financial benefit paid from public funds or derived from the exercise of public authority. The phrase appears most prominently in constitutional and statutory provisions designed to prevent the simultaneous holding of incompatible public positions, to limit the influence of officeholders over legislative bodies, and to bar certain officeholders from receiving independent benefits from the government they serve.
The term functions as a disqualification threshold: one who holds a "place or office of profit" under a government may be rendered ineligible to hold another specified position, to sit in a legislative body, or to receive certain grants or appointments. The "profit" element distinguishes mere honorary or ceremonial offices from those carrying material compensation, though the boundary is not always obvious in practice.
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Common Confusion
"Place" and "office" are not synonyms in this phrase, though they are often treated as such. Historically, an "office" implied a continuing public duty with defined legal responsibilities, while a "place" referred to a position of public employment or trust that might lack the formal legal character of an office proper. The conjunction of both terms in constitutional and statutory language was deliberate — drafters sought to capture the full range of compensated public positions, not merely those formally denominated as offices. Researchers who focus only on "office" risk missing positions that qualify as "places" under the broader formulation.
The phrase should also be distinguished from "office of trust," which captures positions of public responsibility without necessarily carrying financial benefit. Constitutional provisions frequently enumerate both ("office of trust or profit") to ensure comprehensive coverage.
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Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is overwhelmingly a creature of constitutional text — found in incompatibility clauses, ineligibility clauses, and emoluments provisions at both the federal and state levels. Researchers working in early American constitutional history will encounter it frequently in debates over legislative independence and separation of powers. Its meaning was contested from the founding era onward, and the scope of "profit" — whether it included contingent fees, future benefits, or positions with nominal compensation — generated substantial dispute in legislative and judicial settings.
In the Law Mind corpus, the phrase will appear most often in constitutional commentaries, legislative debates, treatise discussions of public office, and opinions addressing dual officeholding or legislative disqualification. Because the term is definitional gatekeeper for constitutional prohibitions, its interpretation in any given source will be context-dependent: a broad reading of "profit" expands the disqualification; a narrow reading contracts it.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that state constitutional provisions using this phrase vary considerably in their scope and have been interpreted differently across jurisdictions. A researcher relying on federal constitutional commentary to interpret a state provision — or vice versa — risks importing the wrong analytical framework.
The phrase also appears in the context of foreign emoluments and domestic emoluments debates, where the question of what constitutes "profit" from a governmental source has modern resonance despite archaic phrasing.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence do not provide a substantive entry for this phrase. The source material attributed to this term in the available corpus is a misalignment — the Rapalje & Lawrence entries visible in the source material relate to "PISTOL" and "PISTOL, CONCEALED," which bear no connection to the present term. This appears to be a cataloging or indexing artifact in the corpus.
Researchers should therefore treat this entry as relying on the phrase's established legal meaning derived from constitutional text and commentary rather than from any direct Rapalje & Lawrence definition. For historical dictionary support on this term, the more productive shelf sources are likely Bouvier's Law Dictionary (which addresses "office" and "place" at length) and Black's Law Dictionary, both of which discuss the distinction between office and place and the significance of the profit element in disqualification contexts.
The absence of a direct entry in Rapalje & Lawrence is itself informative: by the late nineteenth century, the phrase may have been sufficiently embedded in constitutional text that dictionary compilers treated its meaning as self-evident or left its interpretation to constitutional commentators rather than legal lexicographers.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase appears in both the U.S. Constitution and numerous state constitutions, but its scope varies by document and by interpretive tradition. Federal constitutional usage centers on the Ineligibility Clause (Article I, Section 6) and the Emoluments Clauses. State constitutional provisions using analogous language have been interpreted independently, and what qualifies as a "place of profit" under one state's constitution may not qualify under another's.
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