Definition
In legal contexts, popularity refers to a scheme or mechanism — most commonly a promotional contest — in which public favor or votes are solicited in connection with a commercial transaction. The term appears in older legal sources primarily in the phrase "popularity contest," describing a promotional arrangement in which participants earn votes by purchasing goods or services (such as newspaper subscriptions or advertising), and those votes are cast for nominated candidates, with the winner determined by total votes accumulated. Such schemes were evaluated under law governing lotteries, unfair trade practices, and promotional contests.
The term carries no independent doctrinal weight as a standalone legal concept. Its legal significance arises situationally — when a court or regulatory body must characterize a popularity contest as either a lawful promotion or an unlawful lottery or scheme.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The quality or state of being widely liked or in favor with the people at large.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The quality or state of being esteemed by, or of being in favor with, the people at large; good will or favor proceeding from the people. Also noted as encompassing qualities adapted or pleasing to common or vulgar people, with connotations of cheapness or inferiority.
The gap between common and legal meaning here is narrow but specific. In ordinary usage, popularity is an abstract social quality. In the legal sources, the word is almost entirely confined to the compound "popularity contest," a concrete commercial scheme with particular structural features — paid participation, vote accumulation, and competitive selection — that triggered regulatory scrutiny. A researcher encountering "popularity" in older legal materials should not read it as commentary on social standing; it signals a defined promotional mechanism.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "popularity" in Law Mind corpus materials should be alert to several issues:
First, the term almost never appears in isolation in legal texts. Its operative context is the popularity contest scheme, a specific commercial arrangement common in early twentieth-century newspaper and retail promotions. Bouvier's treatment reflects this: the entry is not a theoretical definition of popularity as a legal value, but a description of a specific factual pattern — paid subscriptions generating votes, candidates competing for prizes — that courts were asked to classify.
Second, the central legal question in popularity contest cases was lottery classification. Courts asked whether the scheme involved prize, chance, and consideration — the classic lottery triad. A popularity contest with paid vote-purchasing could satisfy all three elements, making it an illegal lottery under state statutes. The legal analysis of "popularity contests" therefore connects directly to lottery law and promotional contest regulation, not to any freestanding doctrine of popularity.
Third, this is a historically bounded term. Popularity contest schemes of the newspaper-subscription type are largely obsolete as a commercial practice. Researchers will encounter the term primarily in materials from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Modern promotional contest law uses different vocabulary (sweepstakes, skill contests, prize promotions) and is governed by distinct federal and state frameworks. Do not assume continuity between historical "popularity contest" analysis and contemporary promotional contest regulation.
Fourth, the term does not appear to have generated a stable body of doctrine under the name "popularity." Courts resolved individual cases under lottery statutes or trade regulation law without constructing a jurisprudence labeled by this term. Searches limited to "popularity" as a keyword may miss the bulk of relevant materials, which are indexed under lottery, prize contest, or unfair competition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary does not provide a formal doctrinal definition of popularity as a legal term of art. The entry instead presents a factual pattern: a scheme announced by a newspaper in which payment for subscriptions or advertising generates votes, those votes may be cast for named candidates, and the candidate accumulating the most votes wins. This is descriptive rather than analytical — Bouvier is recording a recognized commercial arrangement, not articulating legal elements.
Webster's 1913 offers two relevant meanings: the neutral sense of widespread public favor, and a secondary, somewhat pejorative sense of being adapted to common or vulgar tastes, with connotations of inferiority. Neither meaning maps precisely onto the legal usage. The legal sources are not drawing on either of Webster's definitions; they are using "popularity contest" as a term of commercial art for a specific promotional structure.
The historical dictionaries offer limited analytical guidance here. What they confirm is that by the time Bouvier was cataloguing the term, "popularity contest" had sufficient legal currency to warrant inclusion as a recognized scheme — evidence that such arrangements were common enough to generate legal disputes requiring resolution.
Jurisdictional Note
Lottery and promotional contest law is state-governed and varied significantly in the relevant period. Whether a popularity contest constituted an illegal lottery depended on how a given state defined the elements of lottery — particularly whether "chance" was present when votes were purchasable but outcomes turned on accumulated totals. Researchers should identify the controlling state statute for any historical case, as outcomes were not uniform.