Definition
Repute is a person's standing or estimation in the community — the collective opinion held of an individual by those who know them. In legal usage, repute functions as a term of art closely associated with character evidence: it refers to what a person is generally known or understood to be within a relevant community, as distinguished from any particular act or private assessment.
Bouvier's draws a careful line between repute and reputation, treating repute as referring more to a person's actual character as it is socially recognized, while reputation denotes the report or rumor circulating about that character. In practice the two terms are often used interchangeably, but the conceptual distinction has procedural consequences in evidence law — particularly when courts consider whether a witness may testify to a party's or witness's repute in the community as a form of character evidence.
The phrase good repute appears frequently in older legal instruments, licensing statutes, and naturalization requirements, where it functions as a substantive legal standard rather than a mere descriptor. To be of good repute was a prerequisite for certain legal statuses, appointments, or privileges.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Reputation, especially a good reputation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To hold in thought; to account; to estimate; to hold; to think; to reckon. Used as a verb meaning to regard or consider someone in a certain light.
The gap between common and legal usage is modest but worth noting. Ordinary English treats repute primarily as a noun meaning reputation — often with a positive connotation. Legal usage, by contrast, treats repute as a more technical concept tied to community knowledge and evidentiary admissibility. A legal instrument requiring a person to be of good repute is not simply asking whether others think well of them; it is invoking a standard with procedural content — a showing that can be made through testimony, records, or community witnesses.
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Common Confusion
REPUTE vs. REPUTATION: These terms are used interchangeably in most modern legal writing and in most historical dictionaries. Bouvier's 1914 edition is a notable exception, treating repute as character itself (as socially perceived) and reputation as the report or word-of-mouth about that character. This distinction, if it ever had firm doctrinal support, did not survive into modern evidence law. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 405 and its state equivalents, the operative concept is reputation, and repute survives mainly in statutory phrases like good repute and phrases of good repute. Researchers encountering repute in older opinions or statutes should not assume it carries a meaning distinct from reputation without checking the specific jurisdiction and era.
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Why It Matters in Research
Repute appears in two distinct research contexts that demand different approaches.
First, as an evidentiary concept, repute is the older term for what modern evidence codes call reputation evidence. Pre-twentieth-century opinions discussing the admissibility of character testimony may use repute where a modern court would write reputation. Researchers reading older case law on character evidence should treat repute as a functional synonym for reputation unless context suggests otherwise. The shift in preferred terminology is largely stylistic, but Bouvier's effort to distinguish the two terms means you may find older secondary sources that treat them as meaningfully different.
Second, as a statutory standard, good repute survives in active legal instruments. Naturalization statutes, professional licensing requirements, fitness-to-serve provisions, and some testamentary and fiduciary qualification clauses have historically required that a person be of good repute or of good moral character and repute. These phrases carry their own interpretive histories. When researching whether a person meets a good repute standard, courts have looked to community testimony, absence of criminal record, and professional standing — making the term a gateway to character evidence doctrine even outside the courtroom.
Researchers using Law Mind's corpus should note that repute concentrates heavily in nineteenth and early twentieth century sources. After the Federal Rules of Evidence were promulgated in 1975, reputation largely displaced repute in federal legal writing. State law materials, particularly older licensing and naturalization-adjacent statutes, retain the term longer. Searching only reputation in those contexts risks missing relevant authority.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is sparse: it defines repute as character, as distinguished from reputation, and cites a single Pennsylvania district report. The citation to 3 Dist. Rep. (Pa.) 271 anchors the distinction in Pennsylvania practice, and researchers should be cautious about generalizing it. Bouvier's cross-reference to GOOD REPUTE signals that the compound phrase carries more doctrinal weight than the standalone term — good repute was a legal standard with operational meaning, while repute alone functioned mostly as a component concept.
What Bouvier's does not address is how courts actually applied the distinction between repute and reputation in practice, or whether the distinction produced different evidentiary outcomes. The historical record suggests it largely did not: courts in other jurisdictions used the terms interchangeably, and treatise writers after Wigmore followed suit. Bouvier's distinction, while interesting, appears to reflect one editorial preference rather than a settled doctrinal rule with broad support.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Methods of Proving Character — Rule 405 (Reputation, Opinion, Specific Instances), Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia. This entry addresses how reputation evidence is offered and tested under modern evidence rules, providing the contemporary doctrinal framework that displaced historical usage of repute as a freestanding evidentiary concept.
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