Definition
To postpone means, in legal usage, to do one of two things:
1. (Procedural) To put off a scheduled proceeding, hearing, or action to a later time. In this sense, postpone is functionally synonymous with continue or adjourn — the matter is not dismissed or abandoned but is rescheduled or held over.
2. (Priority) To place one claim, lien, or right behind another in order of priority. In this sense, an earlier-arising lien may be "postponed" to a later lien when circumstances — such as fraud, estoppel, or agreement — cause the earlier lien to lose its preferred position. The earlier lienholder is not stripped of the lien but is subordinated in the order of satisfaction.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To delay or put off an event, appointment, or similar matter; to place after in order of importance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To defer to a future or later time; to put off; also to place after in respect to precedence, preference, value, or importance.
The common and legal meanings track closely in the procedural sense. The gap worth noting is the priority sense: outside of legal contexts, most speakers would not recognize "postpone" as a term describing the subordination of a property interest or lien. A researcher encountering "the earlier mortgage was postponed" in a historical deed or equity opinion should not read it as a scheduling matter — it is a statement about the order of claims against property.
Common Confusion
POSTPONE vs. CONTINUE vs. ADJOURN: In procedural usage these three terms describe the same general act — pushing a proceeding forward in time — but carry different implications depending on jurisdiction and context. A continuance typically refers to rescheduling before the proceeding begins or is underway; an adjournment often refers to suspending a proceeding already in session; postponement is the broadest term and may describe either. Black's 2nd Edition notes that "postponement" in legal proceedings is nearly equivalent to "continuance," with postponement generally preferred when the cause is adjourned to another time rather than formally continued on the docket. Researchers should treat these as near-synonyms in historical sources but verify local practice when jurisdiction-specific procedure is at issue.
POSTPONE vs. VACATE: To postpone a proceeding is to reschedule it; to vacate a scheduled date is to cancel it without necessarily rescheduling. These terms are not interchangeable and the distinction matters when tracing whether a matter was merely delayed or effectively abandoned.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of postpone — procedural deferral and priority subordination — creates a genuine reading trap in historical legal documents. Pre-twentieth-century equity opinions, mortgage cases, and lien priority disputes routinely use "postponed" in the subordination sense, which will mislead a researcher who applies only the scheduling meaning.
In the priority context, postponement of a lien is a doctrine with equitable roots. Courts of equity would postpone an earlier legal or equitable interest when the holder had misled subsequent parties or failed to give notice. The doctrine appears frequently in older English and American equity decisions involving mortgages, vendor's liens, and judgment liens. The term "postponement of lien" as a technical phrase has largely been replaced in modern practice by "subordination," but the older vocabulary persists in historical documents and in some treatise literature.
In the procedural context, the Law Mind corpus will reflect regional variation in whether courts preferred "postpone," "continue," or "adjourn." Federal sources tend to prefer "continuance" as the formal term; state courts and older sources use "postpone" more freely. When indexing or searching procedural history in case files, all three terms should be queried.
Bouvier's entry for postpone is brief and exclusively procedural, which means researchers relying solely on Bouvier for guidance will miss the priority doctrine entirely.
Historical Dictionary Support
The shelf sources agree on both core meanings. Black's (both editions) and Anderson's each present the procedural sense first and the priority sense second, which reflects the relative frequency of the two uses rather than a hierarchy of importance. All four sources treat the term with similar brevity, signaling that it was considered a well-understood general word rather than a term of art requiring extended definition.
Black's 2nd Edition offers the most useful additional information, noting the near-equivalence of "postponement" and "continuance" and distinguishing the two on the grounds that postponement describes adjournment to another time while continuance carries a more formal docket connotation. This distinction is not reflected in the 1st Edition or in Anderson's.
Bouvier's entry is the thinnest, touching only the procedural meaning before pivoting to an unrelated entry on postulatio. Bouvier's silence on the priority doctrine is a meaningful gap for researchers working in equity or property law.
None of the historical sources elaborate on the equitable doctrine underlying lien postponement — they describe the result (the earlier lien is placed after the later one) without explaining the conditions under which courts would impose it. For that analysis, researchers must move from the dictionary entries to treatise literature on equity and mortgage law.
Jurisdictional Note
The priority subordination meaning of postpone is more prevalent in older English equity sources and in American states with strong equity traditions. Modern American practice overwhelmingly uses "subordination" for the priority concept, making "postpone" in that sense primarily a historical usage. In procedural contexts, whether a court uses "postpone," "continue," or "adjourn" to describe rescheduling is largely a matter of local and institutional convention with no substantive legal difference.