Definition
"Pocket" as a standalone legal term has no independent legal definition. It functions exclusively as a modifier in compound legal phrases, each carrying a meaning derived from the word's sense as a concealed or private receptacle — something kept close, held quietly, or withheld from public view. The legally significant compound phrases are:
1. POCKET VETO: The indirect rejection of a bill by an executive who, rather than formally vetoing it, simply declines to sign it within the required period while the legislature is not in session — effectively allowing the bill to die without an affirmative act of disapproval. At the federal level, the President has ten days (Sundays excepted) to sign or return a bill; if Congress adjourns during that window, the unsigned bill does not become law.
2. POCKET BOROUGH: A borough whose parliamentary representation was effectively controlled — "kept in the pocket" — by a single patron, family, or landowner. The term is primarily historical, associated with pre-reform English electoral corruption.
3. POCKET JUDGMENT: A judgment that is kept from the public record, held privately by the creditor rather than enrolled or docketed in the court's records. Historically used to preserve a secret lien over a debtor's property.
4. POCKET SHERIFF: A sheriff appointed by private grant rather than elected or appointed through ordinary public process; historically, a sheriff whose office was held at the pleasure of a private patron.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A bag stitched to an item of clothing for carrying small items; by extension, a person's financial resources; an enclosed volume of one substance within another.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A small bag inserted in a garment for carrying small articles, particularly money; hence figuratively, money or wealth.
The legal compounds all draw on the figurative senses of "pocket" — secrecy, private control, and concealment — rather than the literal garment accessory. Researchers encountering any "pocket" compound in a legal source should treat it as carrying the idea of something withheld, privately held, or kept from ordinary public process.
Common Confusion
POCKET VETO vs. ADJOURNMENT SINE DIE: Not every congressional adjournment triggers a pocket veto opportunity. The scope of what counts as an "adjournment" sufficient to prevent bill return has been contested, with intrasession recesses and brief adjournments treated differently from final adjournment at the end of a Congress. Historical sources often conflate these scenarios.
POCKET JUDGMENT vs. COGNOVIT JUDGMENT: Both involve judgment mechanisms that operate outside ordinary adversarial process, but a pocket judgment is distinguished by its concealment from the public record. A cognovit judgment is confessed openly by the debtor. The two are sometimes conflated in older treatises.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is navigational: "pocket" alone will not appear as an index term in most legal sources, but its compounds appear across constitutional law, electoral history, creditor-debtor practice, and English legal history. Researchers should index and search for the full compound phrase, not the word "pocket" in isolation.
For constitutional researchers, the pocket veto is the highest-stakes compound and has genuine doctrinal complexity. The key fault line — what counts as an adjournment that prevents the President from returning a bill — remains incompletely resolved and has generated executive branch memoranda, Department of Justice opinions, and political disputes that do not always appear in judicial decisions. Historical sources may reflect pre-modern understandings that do not map cleanly onto current practice.
For legal historians working in English electoral or local government records, "pocket borough" and "pocket sheriff" will appear in pre-1832 sources. The Reform Act 1832 largely eliminated pocket boroughs as a practical matter, so the term drops from legal usage in English sources after that date. American sources occasionally borrowed the phrase as political rhetoric but it was never a term of American law.
"Pocket judgment" is the compound most likely to mislead modern researchers. The practice of keeping judgments off the formal record was addressed and largely curtailed by recording and docketing requirements that developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A "pocket judgment" encountered in early English or colonial American records may reflect a legally recognized (if disfavored) practice; the same phrase in a later source is more likely a pejorative or a description of fraud.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) treats "pocket" as purely adjectival in legal usage, directing readers to the compound entries rather than defining the root term. This is accurate and reflects the word's actual status in legal vocabulary — it contributes a consistent coloring of concealment or private control across all its compounds, but has no independent legal content.
The historical dictionaries do not disagree on this point. What they collectively underserve is the constitutional dimension of the pocket veto, which had not fully developed into contested doctrine by the time the earliest legal dictionaries were compiled. Modern researchers should treat historical dictionary entries on the pocket veto as incomplete guides to the current doctrinal state.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Veto Power — Line-Item Veto, Pocket Veto, and Constitutional Limits (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)