Definition
To reconcile, in legal usage, means to resolve apparent inconsistency or conflict between two or more things so that both can be accepted or applied simultaneously. The term operates across several distinct legal contexts:
1. RECONCILING TESTIMONY OR EVIDENCE: To bring conflicting witness statements or items of evidence into compatibility — or, failing that, to weigh them and determine which is entitled to credit. A jury may be instructed to reconcile conflicting testimony where possible before concluding that one account must be disbelieved.
2. RECONCILING STATUTES OR LEGAL INSTRUMENTS: To interpret two apparently contradictory provisions, statutes, clauses, or authorities in a manner that gives effect to both, avoiding the conclusion that one nullifies the other. Courts apply this principle in statutory construction, in reading contracts, and in harmonizing precedents.
3. RECONCILING ACCOUNTS: In commercial and financial law, to verify that two independent records of a transaction or account — such as a ledger and a bank statement — agree, or to identify and resolve discrepancies between them. A failure to reconcile accounts is often relevant in fraud, fiduciary duty, and accounting malpractice contexts.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To restore a friendly relationship; to bring back to harmony; to make things compatible or consistent; to make the net difference in credits and debits of a financial account agree with the balance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To cause to be friendly again; to restore to friendship; to bring back to harmony. Also used in the sense of reconsecrating a defiled church or restoring a person to divine favor.
Editorial note: The ordinary meaning of reconcile carries a relational or emotional sense — ending estrangement between persons. Legal usage strips away the personal dimension almost entirely. In law, what is being reconciled is not a relationship but a conflict between abstractions: statements, texts, or numbers. Researchers encountering the term in jury instructions or opinions should not read any sense of "forgiveness" or "restoration" into it; the operative meaning is closer to "make consistent" or "resolve the apparent contradiction."
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Common Confusion
RECONCILE vs. HARMONIZE: These terms are functionally interchangeable in most legal contexts, particularly in statutory construction and evidence law. Bouvier expressly notes that while reconcile and harmonize are not etymologically synonymous, they are close enough in meaning that a jury instruction using one rather than the other will not mislead. Researchers should treat both as equivalent signals that a court is attempting to resolve a conflict without discarding either authority.
RECONCILE vs. OVERRIDE/REPEAL BY IMPLICATION: Courts have a strong preference for reconciling conflicting statutes over concluding that one implicitly repeals the other. The doctrine of reconciliation operates as a brake on implied repeal analysis — only after genuine reconciliation is impossible does the implied repeal question become live.
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Why It Matters in Research
The practical research challenge with reconcile is that it is a process term — it names what a court or analyst is doing, not a rule or doctrine with its own defined elements. This makes it difficult to search for as a doctrinal category but essential to recognize when reading opinions.
In evidence research, jury instruction language around reconciling conflicting testimony is highly jurisdiction-specific in phrasing, even when the underlying principle is uniform. Historical jury charge forms may use reconcile, harmonize, or consistent interchangeably. When tracing a line of cases about witness credibility instructions, do not assume that variation in the governing verb signals a legal distinction.
In statutory construction, reconcile appears as a structural move in the court's analysis — often introduced with formulas like "we must first attempt to reconcile" or "these provisions can be reconciled by reading." Identifying this move in an opinion helps researchers locate where the court commits to a particular interpretive strategy and where the holding actually turns.
In accounting and fiduciary contexts, failure to reconcile is a factual predicate, not a legal standard. The significance of an unreconciled account depends entirely on what duty of care or fiduciary obligation applied. Researchers should look to the underlying substantive claim (breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, negligent accounting) rather than treating "failure to reconcile" as an independently actionable category.
Bouvier's note about the South Dakota authority (3 S. Dak. 134) reflects a late nineteenth-century jury instruction dispute that is representative of a broader historical period when courts wrestled with the precision of charge language. Researchers working in that era should expect substantial variation in instruction language without corresponding variation in substance.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary addresses reconcile narrowly, focusing on its use in jury instructions regarding conflicting testimony. The entry's core contribution is the point that reconcile and harmonize, though not strict synonyms etymologically, are legally interchangeable in this context — close enough that a jury instruction using either will not be held defective on that ground alone.
What Bouvier does not address is the statutory construction usage, which became significantly more developed in the twentieth century as federal and state legislative output increased and courts required more formal frameworks for resolving textual conflicts. The accounts-reconciliation usage similarly receives no treatment in Bouvier — reflecting that commercial accounting as a formalized legal predicate was less prominent in the era of the dictionary's principal editions.
Webster's 1913 preserves the older theological sense (reconciling a defiled church to sanctity, reconciling a sinner to God) that had already faded from legal usage by the time Bouvier wrote. That sense is purely historical and should not be imported into legal text analysis.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Evidence — Conflicting Testimony and Credibility; Statutory Interpretation — Harmonization and Implied Repeal; Account Stated and Fiduciary Accounting.
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