Definition
Raising a use is the act of creating, establishing, or calling into existence a use in land — that is, bringing a use into being through operation of law or the construction of a conveyance, where the instrument itself does not expressly declare one. The concept belongs to the pre-modern law of uses and, by extension, to the early law of trusts that grew from it.
Most commonly, a use was "raised" in two circumstances. First, where a grantor conveyed land to another without any consideration and without naming a beneficiary, equity presumed the grantor did not intend to make an outright gift and would imply a use back in favor of the grantor — a resulting use. Second, courts and equity would raise a use from the circumstances of a transaction wherever the parties' intent, the presence of consideration, or the structure of the conveyance made it inequitable to permit the nominal holder of legal title to take the benefit of the land for himself.
The term is inseparable from the Statute of Uses (1535), which in most cases executed the use — meaning it converted the equitable interest of the use-beneficiary into a legal estate — the moment the use was raised. Raising a use was therefore not merely a procedural step; it was often the mechanism by which legal title itself shifted, because execution followed automatically.
Common Confusion
"Raising a use" is frequently encountered alongside "executing a use" and "resulting use," and the three can blur together in historical sources. Raising a use describes the creation or implication of the use in the first place. Executing a use describes what the Statute of Uses did to a use once raised — it converted the equitable interest into a legal estate, collapsing the dual ownership structure. A resulting use is one species of raised use: a use implied back to the grantor for want of consideration or declared beneficiary. Researchers reading historical treatises and reports must be alert to which stage of the process a given author is describing.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a term of historical property law. Researchers will encounter it primarily in three contexts: (1) English and early American case law and treatises dealing with conveyancing before and after the Statute of Uses; (2) scholarly and doctrinal discussions of how the modern trust descended from the use; and (3) cases involving resulting trusts, where courts occasionally reach back to use-language when explaining why an implied trust arises for want of consideration.
The principal research trap is anachronism. Sources from different centuries use "raising a use" in subtly different ways depending on whether the Statute of Uses is assumed to be in full force, partially in force, or — in equity's later maneuvering — deliberately evaded by layering a use upon a use. In jurisdictions that received English law, American courts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries frequently discuss raised uses in the context of deed construction; those discussions can look superficially like modern resulting trust doctrine but rest on distinct conceptual foundations.
Because the Statute of Uses was not uniformly received, enacted, or interpreted the same way across American states, corpus researchers should not assume that a statement about raising a use in an English source carries identical weight in an American jurisdiction. Some states enacted their own Statute of Uses analogues; others effectively abolished uses by statute; still others worked the transformation through case law.
The connection to resulting trust doctrine is the live thread for modern research. Contemporary resulting trust cases — particularly those involving gratuitous transfers — continue to echo the logic of the raised use: equity presumes that a transferor who parts with property without consideration did not intend to benefit the recipient. Understanding why courts say this requires tracing it back through use doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence give essentially identical definitions, both drawn from the same underlying source (Brown's treatise on uses). This convergence reflects how thoroughly the doctrine had been settled and synthesized by the time both dictionaries were compiled — but it also means neither entry adds analytical depth beyond the core illustration. Both definitions capture the resulting-use scenario as the paradigm case but say nothing about uses raised by bargain and sale, covenant to stand seised, or other common law methods, all of which were significant in practice. Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries will miss the broader mechanics of how uses were raised in conveyancing and litigation. Historical treatises — particularly Coke on Littleton, Sanders on Uses and Trusts, and Lewin on Trusts — are necessary supplements for substantive research.
Jurisdictional Note
The Statute of Uses 1535 applied as received common law in many American jurisdictions, but its application varied significantly. New York's Revised Statutes of 1830 effectively abolished active uses and trusts in most forms and replaced them with a statutory scheme; other states followed similar paths. Researchers must identify whether the jurisdiction at issue treated the Statute of Uses as in force and, if so, how local courts interpreted the "execution" of a raised use.