Definition
In English practice, special allowances are discretionary cost awards made by a taxing officer when assessing costs between party and party. Where the ordinary scale of costs does not cover or adequately compensate for particular litigation expenses, the taxing officer is empowered to depart from that scale and allow amounts that would not otherwise be recoverable under the standard fee schedule.
The term operates in the context of cost taxation — the formal process by which a court officer (the taxing master or taxing officer) reviews and approves the costs one party may recover from another. Standard scales set presumptive amounts for recognized categories of legal work. Special allowances are the mechanism for stepping outside those presumptive amounts when the circumstances warrant.
Common Confusion
Special allowances in the cost-taxation sense should not be confused with:
— Allowances in family law (maintenance, support, or interim payment orders);
— Allowances in estate administration (personal representative compensation, family allowances against an estate);
— The modern American usage in commercial real estate, where "tenant improvement allowance" or "TI allowance" refers to a landlord's contribution to buildout costs.
These are distinct institutions that share vocabulary but differ in context, legal basis, and remedy. A researcher encountering "special allowances" in a historical source must fix the procedural context before interpreting the term.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily a creature of English procedural practice and appears most naturally in pre-twentieth-century English materials — treatises on costs, taxation of bills, and Supreme Court practice guides. Researchers working in American sources will encounter the term infrequently, and usually only in jurisdictions that modeled their cost-taxation rules closely on English practice.
Several research traps apply:
First, the term is period-dependent. English procedural reform — particularly through the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875 and subsequent Rules of the Supreme Court — repeatedly revised cost-taxation regimes. A reference to "special allowances" in an 1860 treatise may describe a mechanism that was restructured or renamed by 1890. The historical source's publication date matters considerably.
Second, American courts that inherited English cost-taxation vocabulary did not uniformly adopt the English "special allowance" mechanism. Many American jurisdictions moved toward statutory fee schedules or full discretionary awards, collapsing the distinction between ordinary scale and special allowance into a single judicial determination. Treating an English procedural term as a universal one will produce errors.
Third, the term surfaces in secondary contexts — insurance, trusts, government benefits, military pay — with entirely different meanings. Corpus searches on "special allowances" will return results across these domains. Researchers should filter by procedural or costs-related context to isolate the cost-taxation meaning.
Fourth, where American materials do discuss special allowances in the costs context, they may be addressing counsel fees awarded in equity, guardian ad litem compensation, or receiver fees — all of which share the feature of court-authorized departure from ordinary fee norms, but each governed by separate doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in close agreement on this term: both define special allowances as the taxing officer's power to award costs beyond what the ordinary scale permits, between party and party. The definitions are nearly identical in substance, with Rapalje & Lawrence being marginally more compressed.
Neither source elaborates on the standard governing when such allowances are appropriate — the "in certain cases" language in both definitions is left unglossed. This is a meaningful gap for researchers. Historical practice materials and the annotated Rules of the Supreme Court (English) supply the governing criteria that the dictionary entries omit: factors typically included the complexity of the matter, the importance of the questions raised, or the particular skill required. The dictionaries capture the mechanism but not its operative limits.
Both entries reflect a common nineteenth-century assumption that the reader is practicing in or studying English courts. Neither addresses American application. This is characteristic of the period — Black's early editions drew heavily on English procedural vocabulary without always flagging the jurisdictional provenance.
Jurisdictional Note
Special allowances in the cost-taxation sense are distinctively English in origin. American procedural systems generally do not use this terminology in the same technical way; cost awards in U.S. courts are more commonly addressed through Rule 54 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (and state analogs) or through fee-shifting statutes. Researchers working in American jurisdictions should treat this as an English procedural term unless a specific American rule or statute adopts the language expressly.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Partial relevance: realestate_58 (Commercial Lease Negotiation — Key Terms, including TI Allowance) in The Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia. Note that the "allowance" concept in commercial leasing is a distinct usage unrelated to cost taxation. Researchers interested in the commercial real estate meaning of allowances should consult that entry; researchers working with the procedural cost-taxation meaning will find no direct encyclopedia match.