Definition
A resignee is the person in whose favor a resignation is made — that is, the individual who receives or benefits from an act of resignation, particularly in the context of ecclesiastical or feudal office. The term does not describe the person who resigns (the resignor), but the beneficiary of that act.
In its technical legal sense, the resignee is the party to whom the rights, office, or position is surrendered or yielded, typically through a formal instrument of resignation that operates to vest the subject matter in the resignee upon completion of the required legal formalities.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "One who resigns from employment" (primary sense); also "one to whom anything is resigned, or in whose favor a resignation is made" (secondary sense).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "One to whom anything is resigned, or in whose favor a resignation is made."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is significant and directionally opposite. In modern colloquial use, "resignee" has drifted toward meaning the person who resigns — following the pattern of words like "employee" or "nominee," where the suffix "-ee" identifies the actor rather than the recipient. The legal term inverts this entirely: the resignee is the one who receives the benefit of another's resignation, not the one who resigns. A researcher encountering "resignee" in a modern employment or HR context should not assume the legal meaning applies.
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Common Confusion
RESIGNEE vs. RESIGNOR: These are correlative terms often confused or conflated. The resignor is the party who performs the act of resignation — who surrenders the office, right, or position. The resignee is the party in whose favor that surrender is made. The distinction matters in ecclesiastical law and in any legal instrument formalizing a transfer by resignation, where rights and obligations may attach differently to each party.
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Why It Matters in Research
Resignee is a narrow, technical term that appears almost exclusively in historical legal materials, particularly those touching ecclesiastical law, feudal tenure, and the formal transfer of offices or benefices in Scots law and early English common law. Researchers should be aware of several navigation points:
First, the canonical citation across all source dictionaries is 1 Bell, Comm. 125n — a reference to George Joseph Bell's Commentaries on the Law of Scotland. This situates "resignee" primarily in Scots legal tradition, where the resignation of feudal holdings (resignation in favorem) was a recognized mode of conveying land. In that context, the resignee was the person designated to receive the superiority or fee upon the vassal's surrender.
Second, because the term's legal meaning is the reverse of its modern colloquial drift, researchers using full-text search across mixed historical and contemporary corpora risk false positives. A document describing a "resignee" in a modern employment dispute means something entirely different from one in a 19th-century Scots conveyancing instrument.
Third, the term is sparse in American legal sources. Its appearance in Rapalje & Lawrence and American editions of Black's reflects transplantation from Scots and English ecclesiastical sources rather than indigenous American legal usage. Researchers in American common law contexts are unlikely to encounter it outside of treatise cross-references or glossaries derived from British sources.
Fourth, the Black's entry citing "Broom, Max. 467" (a reference to Herbert Broom's Legal Maxims) alongside the Bell citation suggests the term carried some maxim or principle in the broader common law tradition, though the primary locus remains Scottish feudal conveyancing.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier's — define resignee identically: "one in favor of whom a resignation is made," each citing 1 Bell, Comm. 125n. The uniformity across sources reflects direct borrowing rather than independent development; this is a term that entered American legal dictionaries from a single Scottish legal authority rather than from widespread domestic usage.
Black's first edition adds the citation to Broom, Max. 467, which the second edition omits, suggesting later editors found the Broom reference either insufficiently probative or redundant. Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence track the Bell citation only.
What historical dictionaries do not address is the term's procedural or transactional mechanics — the formalities required for a valid resignation in favorem, the role of the superior in Scots feudal law, or whether the resignee had to be an identified party at the time of resignation. Researchers needing that depth must go directly to Bell's Commentaries and related Scots institutional writers.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is rooted in Scots law and ecclesiastical English law. It has minimal independent footing in American legal tradition. Where it appears in American sources, it is borrowed vocabulary. Researchers working in Louisiana, which retains civil law influences, may find more contextual relevance than in other states, but even there direct usage is rare.
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