Definition
The corrupt practice of exchanging a public office — or a promise, nomination, or appointment to public office — for money, goods, or other private consideration. At its core, the offense treats governmental authority as a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a public trust to be earned or conferred on merit. The seller may be the officer with power to appoint (or influence an appointment), and the buyer is typically the person seeking the position. Both parties to the transaction may be implicated.
The offense encompasses not only completed transactions but also negotiations, solicitations, and agreements made in contemplation of a sale. It is distinct from bribery in the narrow technical sense, though the two offenses overlap and are often charged together.
Common Confusion
Selling public offices is frequently conflated with bribery, and the practical distinction can be subtle. Bribery typically involves payment to a public officer to influence the exercise of an existing official duty — a judge taking money to rule a certain way, for instance. Selling offices involves payment to obtain the office itself, treating the appointment power as something to be privately monetized. In historical English law and in early American statutes, the two were often treated as distinct offenses with separate statutory bases. Researchers should not assume that a source's discussion of bribery covers the sale of offices, or vice versa.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early English and American materials will encounter this offense under multiple names: sale of offices, purchase of offices, traffic in offices, and venality of office. The statutory backbone in English law — 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 16 (1552) and 49 George III, c. 126 (1809) — defined the offense for centuries, and American courts and commentators frequently cited these statutes when reasoning about analogous conduct even before domestic statutes existed.
The offense sits at the intersection of criminal law, constitutional law, and public law. In research, this means it may appear in criminal treatises, in discussions of public officer qualifications, in legislative history of anti-corruption statutes, and in quo warranto proceedings challenging the validity of appointments made through corrupt bargains. Do not limit searches to criminal law sources.
American law did not always have clean statutory coverage. In the early republic, prosecutions sometimes proceeded on common law grounds, drawing on the English statutory and common law background. Later, federal and state statutes addressed the conduct more directly, but terminology varies widely across jurisdictions and time periods. A researcher looking for modern federal treatment should consult statutes governing federal officers and conflict-of-interest provisions rather than expecting the old common law categories to map cleanly onto current law.
One navigational trap: historical sources sometimes treat the purchase side and the sale side of the transaction asymmetrically. Bouvier's framing, following the English statutes, addresses both buying and selling, but some later American sources focus almost exclusively on the seller (the appointing officer). Researchers tracing liability for the buyer — the person who paid for the office — may need to look beyond the obvious headings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary synthesizes the offense directly from English statutory sources, noting that buying or selling any office in the gift of the Crown, or making any negotiation relating thereto, constituted a misdemeanor under 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 16 and 49 George III, c. 126, with the secondary authority of Stephen's Commentaries (11th ed., p. 631). This entry is characteristically terse — Bouvier states the rule and cites the authority without extended analysis.
What Bouvier does not provide, and what researchers should seek elsewhere, is any treatment of how American jurisdictions adapted or departed from the English model, what elements courts required to sustain a conviction, or how the offense was distinguished from related forms of corruption in practice. The entry reflects the English statutory baseline but offers no guidance on the offense's development in American law. Stephen's Commentaries, cited by Bouvier, provides more contextual discussion and is worth consulting directly for the English common law background.
Jurisdictional Note
The English statutory framework (Edward VI and George III) applied in jurisdictions that received English common law, but American states legislated separately and unevenly. Some states codified the offense early; others relied on common law principles for extended periods. Federal law developed its own prohibitions tied to civil service reform and conflict-of-interest regimes. Researchers should not assume uniform coverage across American jurisdictions or between federal and state law.