Definition
Prevarication is a term with distinct technical meanings in civil (Roman) law and English law that do not map neatly onto each other or onto the word's ordinary sense.
1. In civil (Roman) law: The act of proceeding with unfaithfulness and want of probity, applied principally to the concealment of a crime. The term derives from Digest 47.15.6, which addressed advocates or accusers who colluded with the opposing party to suppress or sabotage a prosecution — acting as though they represented one side while secretly serving the other.
2. In English law: A collusion between an informer and a defendant arranged to produce a feigned or sham prosecution — one designed to appear legitimate while in fact being managed for the defendant's benefit or to defeat future genuine proceedings. By extension, it also describes any secret abuse committed in the exercise of a public office or private commission.
3. Broader legal usage: Willful concealment or misrepresentation of truth, particularly by giving evasive, equivocating, or shuffling answers — a usage that approaches (but does not merge with) perjury, since prevarication historically denoted evasion and concealment rather than the outright making of a false statement under oath.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Evasion of the truth; equivocation; deviation from what is right or correct.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of prevaricating, shuffling, or quibbling, to evade the truth or the disclosure of truth; a deviation from the truth and fair dealing." Also noted as "a secret abuse in the exercise of a public office."
The common meaning — evasion, hedging, quibbling — captures only the softest layer of the legal term. In legal contexts, particularly the civil law tradition, prevarication is not mere hedging but an active, often structured betrayal of a representational or official duty. A researcher encountering the term in a legal source and reading it through the lens of ordinary English will likely underestimate both its gravity and its specificity.
Common Confusion
Prevarication is sometimes treated as a synonym for perjury, but the concepts are technically distinct. Perjury requires a false statement made under oath on a material matter. Prevarication, in the English legal tradition, centers on collusion, concealment, and evasive conduct — one can prevaricate without making a single technically false sworn statement. The civil law version emphasizes betrayal of a prosecutorial or advocacy role, which has no clean common law counterpart. Researchers should also avoid conflating prevarication with subornation of perjury: subornation involves inducing another to commit perjury, while prevarication in its technical sense involves the actor's own fraudulent management of a prosecution or office.
Why It Matters in Research
Prevarication is a term that can mislead researchers at every level. Its ordinary English meaning (evasion, equivocation) bleeds into legal texts and can cause a reader to underread a source that uses the term in its precise Roman law or English law sense. Conversely, a researcher looking for material on prosecutorial collusion or official corruption in historical sources may not find it under "prevarication" unless they know to search for it.
The term appears most frequently in materials treating Roman or civil law influence on early English legal thought, and in older treatises and digests discussing the duties of informers and official conduct. It is relatively rare in modern American case law, where the same conduct would more likely be described as fraud, official misconduct, abuse of process, or obstruction. A researcher working in colonial or early republic sources, or in comparative civil law materials, is more likely to encounter it in its technical sense.
The Digest reference (47.15.6) is the anchor citation across all historical sources. When a legal source cites or alludes to that passage, prevarication is being used in the Roman law sense. When the term appears in English common law sources without that anchor, it more likely refers to the informer-defendant collusion or the broader abuse-of-office meaning.
Corpus researchers should note that the term can appear in ecclesiastical law contexts as well, where it sometimes describes an advocate's deliberate mishandling of a client's cause — a usage that tracks the civil law meaning but appears in a different institutional setting.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three shelf sources agree on the core civil law meaning, all anchoring to Digest 47.15.6, and agree that the primary application is to concealment of a crime or betrayal of an advocacy or prosecutorial role. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence are aligned on the English law collusion meaning (citing Cowell) and both extend the term to secret abuse in a public office or private commission. Bouvier is narrower, staying close to the civil law definition and not developing the English collusion usage.
Black's alone notes the broader usage of willful concealment or misrepresentation of truth through evasive answers, which edges the term toward its ordinary English sense while still distinguishing it from outright perjury. This is the most practically useful gloss for a researcher reading older legal texts where the term is used loosely.
None of the shelf sources address the term's modern near-obsolescence in American legal usage, nor do they flag the risk of anachronistic or cross-system confusion — gaps that matter substantially for corpus research.
Jurisdictional Note
Prevarication in its technical senses is largely a term of civil law and historical English law. It does not appear as a defined offense in most American state codes. Researchers working in Louisiana or other mixed-jurisdiction sources informed by the civil law tradition may encounter it in a more technically precise context than researchers working in common law jurisdictions.