Definition
Symboleography is the art or discipline of correctly drafting and executing written legal instruments. The term encompasses the formal knowledge and skill required to give proper legal effect to documents — ensuring that language, form, and execution meet the requirements of law.
The discipline divides into two branches:
1. Judicial symboleography: The drafting of instruments connected to matters already in legal controversy — pleadings, orders, and other documents generated within or for litigation.
2. Extrajudicial symboleography: The drafting of instruments for transactions and arrangements not yet in dispute — contracts, agreements, deeds, and testamentary documents such as wills. This is the larger and more commonly referenced branch.
The word is a term of art from early English legal science, associated primarily with the treatise tradition of conveyancing and instrument-drafting practice rather than with any statutory or common law doctrine.
Common Confusion
Symboleography is sometimes treated as synonymous with conveyancing, but the terms are not identical. Conveyancing refers specifically to the preparation of instruments that transfer interests in real property. Symboleography is the broader concept: the science of all legal instrument drafting, of which conveyancing is one application. A conveyancer practices a subset of symboleography; a symboleographer, in the classical sense, encompasses anyone skilled in the formal preparation of legally operative written documents.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will rarely appear in modern legal materials. Researchers who encounter it should treat it as a marker of period and tradition — its presence in a source signals early modern English legal writing, likely from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when treatise writers systematized the craft of instrument drafting as a learned discipline.
The primary practical significance for corpus researchers is bibliographic. Symboleography is the title and subject of William West's Symboleography (first published 1590), one of the earliest English-language treatises on legal drafting and instrument forms. West's work was a standard reference for practitioners and remained influential well into the seventeenth century. When Black's Law Dictionary attributes its definition to "Wharton," it is drawing on Wharton's Law Lexicon, which itself reflects this older treatise tradition.
Researchers working in early American legal history, colonial practice documents, or the history of notarial and conveyancing traditions may find the term as an organizing concept in source materials. It does not carry forward into nineteenth- or twentieth-century American statutory or case law in any functional sense.
The garbled text in Black's entry — the phrase "Rwho betrays his bias by his extreme readiness to answer questions or volunteer information" — is an artifact of optical character recognition or typesetting error in the digitized source and does not belong to the symboleography definition. Researchers using digitized versions of Black's should be alert to such intrusions, which can corrupt otherwise reliable entries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary reproduces, with attribution to Wharton, a definition sourced ultimately from William West's treatise tradition. The definition is functional but spare: it identifies the judicial/extrajudicial division and correctly situates the extrajudicial branch as concerned with agreements, contracts, and wills.
What historical dictionaries do not convey is the intellectual ambition behind the term as West used it. West presented symboleography not merely as a craft skill but as a systematic science — an attempt to elevate instrument drafting to the status of a legal discipline with its own principles and methodology. This theoretical dimension is lost in the dictionary reduction to a one-sentence gloss.
No significant divergence appears across historical legal dictionaries on the core meaning; the term was never contested. Its disappearance from modern legal vocabulary reflects the professionalization and specialization of drafting practice into distinct fields (conveyancing, will drafting, contract drafting) rather than any doctrinal shift.
Jurisdictional Note
Symboleography as a term of art belongs to the English common law tradition and its early American inheritance. It has no meaningful presence in civil law jurisdictions, where the analogous discipline is organized under notarial law and practice.