REMITTEE

Definition

The person to whom a remittance is made. In commercial and financial contexts, the remittee is the recipient of a payment transmitted by a remitter — typically money sent through a bank, wire transfer, bill of exchange, or similar instrument. The term is the correlative of remitter (in its commercial sense) and identifies the receiving party in any remittance transaction.

Common Confusion

REMITTEE and REMITTER (property law doctrine) are easily conflated when consulting historical sources. The doctrine of remitter concerns a titleholder whose superior earlier title is recognized by law over a defective later acquisition — it has nothing to do with sending money. The commercial remitter is the party sending a remittance; the remittee is the party receiving it. These are separate concepts that happen to share a Latin root and appear in proximity in some historical dictionaries. See REMITTER for both meanings.

Why It Matters in Research

The primary research trap with remittee is the collision between two entirely distinct legal meanings of the root word remitter. When consulting historical sources — particularly Rapalje & Lawrence — researchers will find that remitter carries a technical property law meaning (the doctrine by which a person holding a defective later title to land is treated as holding under a superior earlier title). The person involved in that doctrine is sometimes called the remittee in historical usage, though this is rare and non-standard. The far more common use of remittee is the commercial one: recipient of a remittance. Confusing the two can send a researcher down the wrong path entirely. Because remittee is a passive, relational term — it describes a party, not a doctrine or transaction — it appears most often in the background of cases and treatises dealing with bills of exchange, negotiable instruments, international money transfers, and bailment. Story on Bailments (§ 75), cited uniformly across the historical dictionaries, is the anchoring treatise reference. Researchers working in early American commercial law will encounter remittee in that context. In modern practice, the term survives primarily in banking regulation, wire transfer documentation, and international remittance compliance frameworks, where remittee and remitter are defined parties in transaction records. Researchers working in anti-money-laundering or know-your-customer regulatory material will find remittee used with precision in that regulatory vocabulary.

Historical Dictionary Support

The historical sources are in near-complete agreement. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier reproduce the same one-sentence definition verbatim, all citing Story's Bailments § 75: "A person to whom a remittance is made." Rapalje & Lawrence align on the commercial definition but are notable for immediately pivoting — mid-entry — into an extended treatment of the property law doctrine of remitter, creating an entry that blends two distinct concepts under adjacent headings. This is a characteristic of Rapalje & Lawrence's structure and can mislead a reader who encounters the text out of context. The historical dictionaries offer nothing on jurisdictional variation, procedural significance, or the modern regulatory usage of the term. The Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary definitions are identical in substance to the legal ones, which is itself informative: this is a term where legal and ordinary meaning do not meaningfully diverge.

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