Definition
A pocket sheriff is a sheriff appointed by the direct authority of the English Crown alone, bypassing the customary process by which the monarch selected from candidates nominated by the judges sitting in the Exchequer. Under the ordinary appointment procedure, the judges of the Exchequer would annually nominate three persons for each county, and the Crown would choose one of those nominees as sheriff. A pocket sheriff was the result when the Crown exercised its prerogative to appoint a sheriff outside that nomination process entirely — placing the officeholder, in effect, directly "in the Crown's pocket" rather than through the established judicial filter.
The term is a historical relic of English constitutional practice and has no operative significance in American law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No general entry. "Pocket" in compound terms commonly suggests something small, concealed, or within one's personal control or sphere of influence.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Pocket" as an adjective denotes something diminutive or kept close at hand; used figuratively to suggest personal possession or private control.
Editorial note: The figurative resonance is accurate here. A pocket sheriff was not hidden in any literal sense, but was entirely the Crown's own creature — appointed without the independent check that judicial nomination provided. The common language meaning of "in one's pocket" (meaning under one's control) maps cleanly onto the legal usage, making this one of the more transparent legal compounds.
Common Confusion
Researchers encountering this term in historical English sources should not conflate it with the American constitutional concept of the "pocket veto," which operates on entirely different principles in an entirely different branch of government. The shared word "pocket" signals personal executive prerogative in both cases, but the doctrines are otherwise unrelated. See ENCYCLOPEDIA CROSS-REFERENCE below for the pocket veto context.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily an artifact of English constitutional and administrative history and will appear almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century English legal materials, comparative constitutional histories, and American legal dictionaries that catalogued English law for reference purposes. Researchers working in American sources should treat it as a historical cross-reference, not an operative legal category.
The significance of the pocket sheriff appointment power lies in what it reveals about the contested boundary between Crown prerogative and judicial independence in English local governance. The Exchequer nomination process existed as a practical check on the Crown's appointment power; the pocket sheriff was the mechanism by which the Crown could circumvent that check when it chose to. This made the institution politically sensitive in periods of tension between the Crown and the judiciary.
Researchers using Burrill's Law Dictionary should note that the entry for POCKET SHERIFF runs directly into the separate entry for POER (Law French for "power"), which Burrill begins on the same page. The physical layout of older dictionary editions can cause these distinct entries to appear run together in scanned or transcribed versions; confirm entry boundaries when working from digital reproductions.
All three source dictionaries cite 1 Bl. Comm. 342 and two of the three also cite 3 Steph. Comm. 23. These remain the primary historical anchors for the doctrine. Researchers seeking fuller context should consult those passages in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and Stephen's Commentaries on the Laws of England directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's are in complete substantive agreement on this term — all three define it identically as a sheriff appointed by sole Crown authority outside the ordinary nomination procedure. This unanimity is not surprising: all three entries are derivative of the same Blackstone passage, and the term had no active legal life in American courts that would have generated independent doctrinal development.
Bouvier's is the most precise in specifying that the ordinary process produced three nominees from whom the Crown would select, making explicit what Black's and Burrill's leave implicit. That detail — the three-nominee structure — is useful for understanding why Crown circumvention of the process was notable: the judges were not merely advisory but were the gatekeepers of the candidate pool.
None of the three dictionaries address whether the pocket sheriff appointment power was ever exercised controversially in specific historical episodes, nor do they discuss its eventual obsolescence as English local government was reformed in the nineteenth century. Researchers seeking that context will need to go beyond the dictionary sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
constitutional_37: The Veto Power — Line-Item Veto, Pocket Veto, and Constitutional Limits (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia). Note: The connection is terminological only. The "pocket" in pocket sheriff and the "pocket" in pocket veto both reference executive prerogative exercised unilaterally, but the doctrines arise in entirely different legal systems and contexts. Consult this entry only to distinguish the two concepts, not as substantive authority on the sheriff appointment power.