Definition
In legal instruments, "presents" means the document itself — the very instrument in which the word appears. It does not refer to gifts, to the current moment, or to any external document. The term almost never appears alone; it functions as part of fixed formulaic phrases, most commonly:
- "These presents" — a reference to the current instrument (deed, bond, indenture, power of attorney, etc.)
- "Know all men by these presents" — a traditional opening recital announcing the nature and existence of the instrument to any reader
- "To all to whom these presents shall come, greeting" — a formal salutation in deeds and letters of authority
Each phrase means, in substance: this document, the one you are now reading.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "present" — gifts, or things occurring now.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Present" carries both temporal meaning (now, this moment) and the sense of a gift bestowed. The plural "presents" in ordinary English most naturally means gifts.
The gap matters: A reader encountering "these presents" in a deed without legal training will naturally read it as either a temporal reference ("these current matters") or, absurdly, as gifts. Neither is correct. Legally, "these presents" is a term of art meaning this instrument. The confusion is compounded by the fact that both the temporal and the documentary meanings derive from the same Latin root — præsentes literæ, "present letters" or "the letter now before you" — but the legal meaning has been frozen into formula while the common meaning drifted elsewhere.
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Common Confusion
PRESENTS vs. PRESENTMENT: These are unrelated terms that share a root. "Presentment" in criminal procedure refers to a grand jury's formal accusation on its own initiative. "Presentment" in constitutional law refers to the bicameral passage and delivery of legislation to the executive for signature or veto. Neither has anything to do with the document-reference function of "presents" in private instruments. Researchers encountering either word in historical sources should not conflate them.
PRESENTS vs. PRESENT (temporal): In older instruments, the word "present" also appears in its temporal sense — "at present," "the present grantor," "the present term." Context usually resolves the distinction, but careful reading is required in dense historical instruments where both uses appear in close proximity.
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Why It Matters in Research
"Presents" is almost invisible to a modern reader — the eye slides past it — but it performs a specific technical function in every instrument where it appears. Understanding that function matters for several reasons:
Historical instrument reading: Deeds, bonds, indentures, powers of attorney, and letters patent from the colonial period through the nineteenth century routinely open with "Know all men by these presents" or close with "In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal to these presents." These phrases are not decorative. They signal the operative scope of the instrument. When a deed says "these presents grant and convey," the word "presents" is pointing to that specific document as the legal act — not to any prior agreement, oral promise, or surrounding correspondence.
Corpus searching traps: A full-text search for "presents" in a historical legal corpus will return enormous noise — temporal uses, gift references, and procedural uses — alongside the documentary formula. Researchers searching for conveyancing instruments should pair the term with its fixed collocations: "these presents," "by these presents," "presents shall come." Searching for "presents" alone is not a useful query.
Formula persistence and jurisdictional survival: The phrase "know all men by these presents" survived in American legal drafting well into the twentieth century and still appears in some standard form deeds and bonds. Its presence does not date an instrument precisely, but its absence in instruments before roughly 1850 would be notable. Post-1900 instruments that omit it are simply following modernized drafting conventions — not doing anything legally different.
Connection to powers of attorney: The phrase "by these presents" is especially persistent in powers of attorney, where the principal formally appoints the agent "by these presents" — meaning by the execution of this very document. Researchers working with agency, trusts, or estate instruments should expect to encounter it in this context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in complete agreement on this term, which is unusual and itself informative. Black's (both editions), Bouvier, Burrill, and Rapalje & Lawrence all define "presents" identically: the present instrument, the writing itself. There is no doctrinal evolution here, no contested meaning, no jurisdictional split. This is a formula term that entered English legal drafting directly from Latin conveyancing — Burrill traces it explicitly to præsentes literæ — and was transplanted wholesale into American practice.
Burrill is the most historically detailed of the sources, noting that literæ was sometimes suppressed in the Latin formula, leaving only præsentes, and that the English "presents" is its direct functional heir. Bouvier's entry is characteristically economical but accurate. Rapalje & Lawrence is notable for treating "presents" not as a standalone entry but as a sub-element of deed language, which correctly reflects how the term actually functions — it only means something as part of a phrase, not in isolation.
None of the historical dictionaries address the full-text search problem, which is a modern concern. None distinguish "presents" (the instrument) from "presentment" (the grand jury or constitutional procedure), presumably because the drafting conventions made confusion unlikely in context. That assumption no longer holds in digital corpus research.
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Jurisdictional Note
No meaningful jurisdictional variation exists in the core meaning of "presents" as a document-reference formula. The phrase was uniform across American jurisdictions because it descended from a common English conveyancing tradition. Individual states modernized their deed and instrument forms on different timelines, so the formula persists longer in some state form books than others, but this is a drafting convention difference, not a legal meaning difference.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
For the constitutional "presentment" procedure (delivery of legislation to the executive), which shares etymological roots but is legally unrelated: The Legislative Process — Bicameralism, Presentment, and the Veto (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia).
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