Definition
A rater is a public official charged with assessing or valuing property for purposes of taxation. The term derives from early colonial American usage and refers specifically to the assessor who determined the taxable value — or "rate" — of a person's property or estate within a given jurisdiction. In this sense, the rater was a functionary of local tax administration, not a judicial officer.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who provides a rating or assessment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who rates or estimates.
The common meaning tracks closely to the legal one, but misses the critical public-official dimension. In ordinary usage, any person offering a judgment or score is a "rater." In the historical legal sense, a rater held a defined governmental role with legal authority to fix taxable values — a distinction that matters when interpreting colonial-era tax records, assessment disputes, or property rolls.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "rater" in early American colonial documents — particularly Plymouth Colony records from the mid-to-late seventeenth century — should read the term as a synonym for assessor or tax appraiser, not as a general evaluator. The word appears in colonial tax statutes and local government records where modern documents would use "assessor" or "appraiser."
The primary trap is anachronism: applying the modern general sense (any person who rates something) to a context where the word carried a specific governmental meaning. A colonial "rater" exercised a quasi-official function, and disputes involving raters would fall within the administrative and fiscal governance structure of the colony, not private law.
Because the term largely disappeared from American legal usage after the colonial period — supplanted by "assessor" — it will rarely appear in nineteenth- or twentieth-century legal materials. Its presence in a source is itself a marker of colonial or very early American provenance. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus to trace the history of property taxation, local government authority, or assessment procedures should treat "rater" as an early terminus on the assessor timeline.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines rater simply as "an assessor," citing the Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth for the years 1643 and 1689. This is a thin entry — two words and two citations — but the citations are precise and the functional identification is unambiguous. Burrill makes no attempt to distinguish the rater from other assessment officers or to describe the scope of the role.
What Burrill omits is any discussion of how the rater's duties were structured, whether the position was elected or appointed, or how assessment disputes were resolved under Plymouth Colony law. For that depth, researchers must go directly to the Plymouth Colony records themselves. The dictionary entry is best understood as a signpost rather than an explanation.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry the term as a distinct legal entry, which is consistent with the word's narrow temporal and geographic footprint in American legal history.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears to be specific to Plymouth Colony and possibly other early New England jurisdictions. It did not become a term of art in post-colonial American law, where "assessor" became the standard designation for the same function. Researchers working on other colonial jurisdictions — Virginia, Maryland, or the Carolinas — should not assume "rater" carried the same meaning or appeared at all in those legal traditions.