Definition
In law, sufferance means passive or implied permission arising from the failure to object or to enforce a right — not affirmative consent, but the absence of prohibition. It is toleration by inaction rather than approval by word or deed.
The term operates in two primary legal contexts:
1. General principle of passive permission. Sufferance describes the legal effect of a party's silence or inaction where action was available. When a right-holder neglects to assert a claim, enforce a rule, or object to conduct, the other party may be said to act by sufferance. This implied license carries no guarantee of continuation; it can be terminated at will by the party who has been tolerating the situation.
2. Tenancy at sufferance. The most common legal application. A tenancy at sufferance arises when a person who originally entered possession of land under a lawful title continues to occupy after that title has expired — without the landlord's permission and without being a trespasser in the technical sense. The holdover tenant (called a tenant at sufferance) once had a valid right of possession; the sufferance consists of the landlord's failure to evict rather than any new grant of permission. It is regarded in traditional property law as the lowest and least protected form of possessory interest — often described as a mere possession, not a true estate.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Endurance, especially patient endurance of pain or adversity; also acquiescence or tacit compliance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The state of suffering; bearing of pain; submission under difficult or oppressive circumstances; loss or damage.
The gap is significant. In ordinary English, sufferance carries connotations of hardship and passive resignation — something endured with difficulty. In law, the hardship element drops away entirely. Legal sufferance is purely structural: it describes a permissive status created by inaction, with no necessary implication that the tolerating party suffers in any experiential sense. A researcher encountering the word in a non-legal historical text should not assume the legal meaning applies.
Common Confusion
Sufferance is frequently conflated with permission, consent, and acquiescence, but the distinctions are legally operative. Permission and consent may be affirmative — expressed by word, writing, or deliberate act. Sufferance is always negative: it exists only because the right-holder did nothing. This matters because sufferance creates no vested rights in the party benefiting from it. A tenant at sufferance, unlike a tenant at will, has no claim that the landlord must provide notice before terminating the arrangement — though many modern statutes have modified this common law position. Sufferance should also not be confused with adverse possession: the tenant at sufferance entered lawfully and remains with the landlord's implicit tolerance, while the adverse possessor typically enters without permission at all.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers face two recurring traps with this term.
First, the ordinary-language meaning bleeds into legal texts in ways that can mislead. Historical documents — pleadings, correspondence, judicial opinions from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — may use "sufferance" in its common sense (pain, endurance) in contexts that appear legal. Always check whether the word is being used technically or descriptively.
Second, the status of tenancy at sufferance has been substantially modified by statute in most American jurisdictions. The common law rule (no notice required, no estate, mere possession) is often not the operative rule today. Holdover tenant statutes, landlord-tenant codes, and summary eviction procedures have layered additional requirements and protections on top of the common law baseline. Research relying only on treatises and historical dictionary sources will miss this statutory overlay entirely. The corpus materials on landlord-tenant law should be checked alongside any common law definitions.
The term also surfaces in customs and commercial law contexts — sufferance wharves, discussed in English sources, are designated landing points where goods could be unloaded before duties were paid. This usage is rare in American legal materials but appears in English legal dictionaries and some early American commercial texts. It is a distinct and unrelated application of the same underlying concept of permission by tolerance.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources converge tightly on the core definition. Black's (both editions), Bouvier, and Burrill all define sufferance as toleration or negative permission arising from the failure to enforce a right. Bouvier's is the most analytically precise, explicitly distinguishing sufferance from assent, consent, leave, and permission on the grounds that those terms may import affirmative expressed volition, while sufferance is purely negative. This is the most useful formulation for research purposes and should be treated as the authoritative baseline.
Burrill traces the term to Law French (suffraunce) and Latin (patientia, meaning patience or endurance), which explains why the ordinary English meaning and the legal meaning share a common ancestor but have diverged in application.
Black's second edition adds the sufferance wharves entry, which no other dictionary in the set addresses in useful detail.
What the historical sources collectively miss: the statutory transformation of tenancy at sufferance in modern landlord-tenant law. These dictionaries describe the common law estate as the lowest possible interest, often not a true estate at all. That description remains accurate as a baseline but is significantly incomplete as a guide to current practice.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions have substantially modified the common law rules governing tenants at sufferance through landlord-tenant statutes. Many states now require some form of notice even for holdover occupants, and some treat a holdover as creating a new periodic tenancy rather than a mere sufferance, depending on the landlord's conduct. English law developed the sufferance wharves concept within its customs framework; this has no direct American counterpart.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
property_17: Landlord-Tenant — Overview and Types of Tenancies (Term, Periodic, At Will, At Sufferance) (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia)