Definition
The party to whom a release is made — that is, the person who receives the benefit of a release executed by another. In civil law contexts, this is typically the party being discharged from a claim, debt, obligation, or liability. The releasee stands in contrast to the releasor (or releaser), who is the party executing and granting the release.
The term appears most frequently in the context of settlement agreements, tort releases, contract discharges, and real property conveyances. A releasee may be an individual, a corporation, or any other legal entity capable of being a party to a legal instrument.
Why It Matters in Research
RELEASEE is a passive-role term — it identifies the beneficiary of a legal act rather than the actor. Researchers working with historical deeds, settlement agreements, or release instruments will encounter it as a term of art in the instrument itself, often appearing in formulaic recitals ("the releasee, their heirs and assigns forever..."). Because the term is almost exclusively a drafting artifact, it rarely appears in judicial opinions except when the scope or identity of the releasee is in dispute.
One practical trap: older instruments, particularly pre-20th century deeds and conveyances, may use "releasee" in the context of real property releases (such as a release of a right of way or a quitclaim-adjacent conveyance), where the releasee is the grantee receiving cleared title rather than a party being discharged from personal liability. Researchers should not assume the term always signals a tort or contract discharge context.
In the Law Mind corpus, RELEASEE will surface most reliably in form books, conveyancing treatises, and settlement instrument templates rather than in appellate case law. When it does appear in case law, it is typically because a court is interpreting the breadth of the release — whether a named releasee was intended to include agents, employees, affiliates, or unnamed co-defendants.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources converge on a single, consistent definition: the releasee is simply the person to whom a release is made. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's are in complete agreement, differing only in the incidental wording of their definitions. None of the sources elaborate on the term's function, the contexts in which it arises, or any distinction between releasees in personal obligation contexts versus property conveyance contexts — a gap that researchers working with older instruments may find consequential.
Black's 2nd Edition includes a minor typographical artifact in the digitized source ("The person to whom & re-") reflecting a scanning or transcription error, not a substantive divergence from the first edition's definition.
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary track the legal definition closely, which is unsurprising: the term has essentially no life outside legal instruments. The common and legal meanings are, for practical purposes, identical.