Definition
In legal usage, RESULT carries two distinct meanings that operate in largely separate areas of law.
1. Property and Trusts. To result is for property to revert — to leap back, in the older phrasing — to its original owner or that owner's representatives when a disposition fails, either entirely or in part. When a trust fails of its purposes, or when a conveyance cannot take effect as intended, the property is said to result back rather than pass to the intended transferee or lapse into a void. This sense underlies the doctrine of the resulting trust and the concept of a resulting use.
2. General Legal Usage. More broadly, result means the consequence, outcome, or effect that flows from a set of facts, conditions, or legal tests. In this sense courts speak of what a rule or statute produces as its result, and legislatures construct liability schemes around what conduct results in harm. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, for example, applies a results test — whether a challenged practice results in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race — rather than requiring proof of discriminatory intent.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To proceed, spring up, or rise as a consequence from facts, arguments, premises, or circumstances; to have something as a consequence; to lead to or bring about.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To come out or have an issue; to terminate; to have consequences; to proceed, spring, or rise as a consequence from facts, arguments, premises, or combination of circumstances. Webster's also preserved the now-obsolete sense of to leap back or rebound, citing Pope.
The ordinary meaning of result as consequence is fully at home in legal writing and creates no interpretive confusion. The gap worth noting is the property-law meaning. When a deed or trust instrument says that property shall result, or when a court holds that a resulting trust arises, the term does not mean that something follows as a consequence — it means that property returns to its origin. A researcher reading historical conveyancing documents or equity opinions who encounters result in the intransitive must ask whether the word signals a reversion, not merely an outcome.
Common Confusion
The verb result and the noun result pull in different directions in legal sources. In trust and property law, result (verb) is almost always the operative word for reversion — the property results to the grantor, not to anyone else. In statutory and constitutional law, result (noun or verb) tracks the ordinary meaning of outcome or consequence. Conflating these produces serious misreadings: an equity court's statement that "the trust resulted" does not mean the trust succeeded or produced a conclusion; it means the trust failed and the property returned.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Resulting trust: The primary doctrinal offspring of the property-law sense. Arises either when a purchase is made in the name of another (purchase-money resulting trust) or when an express trust fails wholly or partly of its purposes (failure-of-express-trust resulting trust). Distinguished from a constructive trust, which is an equitable remedy imposed to prevent unjust enrichment rather than a device giving effect to presumed intent.
Results test: The standard under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as amended in 1982, asking whether a voting practice or procedure results in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race or membership in a language minority group. Contrast with intent-based constitutional standards under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Why It Matters in Research
The property-law sense is the etymological root and was the dominant legal meaning in English equity sources through the nineteenth century. Researchers working in historical trust and conveyancing materials — particularly pre-twentieth-century English and American equity reports — will encounter result as a term of art signaling reversion. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence preserve this usage because it remained live in American courts long after Webster's 1913 had consigned to leap back to the archaic column.
The Rapalje & Lawrence excerpt illustrates a critical practical point about partial failure: when a testamentary trust fails in part, the property does not simply vanish or pass under a residuary clause as a matter of course. It results back in its original character. The example given — land directed to be sold where the sale beneficiaries predecease the testator — shows that the property returns as land to the heir, not as proceeds to the residuary legatees. This distinction between partial and total failure, and between the resulting form of the property, is easy to miss in secondary summaries that treat resulting trusts as a single undifferentiated category.
For constitutional and voting rights research, the results test under Section 2 is the dominant modern usage. Because the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act explicitly rejected the intent standard that the Supreme Court had read into Section 2, the word results in the statute carries deliberate doctrinal weight. Researchers tracing the legislative history of that amendment need to understand the results/intent divide as a conscious congressional choice, not a casual drafting decision.
The term also appears in criminal law and tort contexts as shorthand for the outcome element of a crime or the harm element of a negligence claim — courts will ask whether the prohibited result occurred, whether the defendant's conduct was the cause of that result, and whether the result was within the foreseeable risk. This usage is entirely ordinary-language but benefits from clear labeling in research notes to avoid bleed-over from the trust-law sense.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary preserves both the Mozley & Whitley note on compound interest (a peripheral usage) and the Sweet formulation that captures the core property-law doctrine: "a thing is said to result when, after having been ineffectually or only partially disposed of, it comes back to its former owner or his representatives." This is the clearest single-sentence statement of the reversion sense and remains a useful anchor for reading historical sources.
Rapalje & Lawrence extends the doctrine usefully by addressing partial failure and emphasizing that property results in its original state — land as land, not as money — regardless of intermediate directions in the instrument. This point is underemphasized or absent in more general modern treatments of resulting trusts, making the historical dictionaries more precise on this specific issue than many contemporary secondary sources.
Neither historical source addresses the results test under voting rights law, which is entirely a post-1965 development. Researchers should not expect the shelf dictionaries to illuminate that usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The resulting trust doctrine is recognized across common-law jurisdictions but its scope varies. Some states have modified or abolished the purchase-money resulting trust by statute, particularly in community property states where title rules operate differently. The Voting Rights Act results test applies as a matter of federal statutory law, but its implementation is shaped by ongoing federal court interpretation that differs across circuits.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Resulting Trusts -- Purchase-Money and Failure-of-Express-Trust Resulting Trusts (The Law Mind Trusts, Estates & Probate Encyclopedia)
Constructive and Resulting Trusts as Litigation Remedies (The Law Mind Trusts, Estates & Probate Encyclopedia)
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act -- Vote Dilution and Results Test (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)