Definition
"To make" is a term of legal performance denoting the act of doing something in a legally operative or formally required manner. It appears most often in compound legal phrases where the act carried out must conform to prescribed legal form or procedure to have legal effect. Its principal senses are:
1. To do or perform in conformity with legal form. "To make oath" means to swear in the prescribed manner recognized by law. "To make default" means to fail to appear or answer as legally required. "To make a fine" historically meant to pay or settle a penalty. "To make law" referred to the old compurgation procedure of formally establishing innocence through oath-helpers.
2. To have legal effect or operative force. In this sense, evidence or argument is said to "make for" a party when it supports or tends to establish that party's position. The phrase "that case makes for me" means the cited authority supports the speaker's legal argument.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Make" is a general-purpose verb meaning to create, produce, cause, or bring into existence; also used informally to mean to compel or to arrive at a destination.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To make" carried broad meanings including to cause to exist, to bring about, to perform or execute, and to amount to or constitute.
Editorial note: In ordinary usage, "to make" focuses on creation or causation. In law, the term emphasizes formal performance — the act must be done in legally recognized form to carry legal consequence. A person may colloquially "make a promise," but to "make an oath" in the legal sense requires compliance with a specific formal procedure. The operative distinction is not what is done, but whether it is done in the manner law requires.
Common Confusion
"To make" can be confused with mere informal action or declaration. The legal phrases built around this term — "make oath," "make default," "make law" — require procedural regularity, not simply the underlying act. Failing to appreciate the formal dimension leads to misreading historical pleadings and records, where "made default" or "made fine" carries precise procedural meaning that a modern reader might gloss as merely descriptive.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost never encountered as a standalone entry in legal research but appears constantly as the operative verb in compound legal phrases. Researchers working in historical sources — particularly common law pleading records, Year Books, and early English equity materials — will encounter the phrase structure repeatedly: "to make" followed by the specific legal act. Each such phrase has its own formal meaning and procedural history.
The second sense — "to make for" meaning to support or be favorable to — appears in argument and case analysis contexts. Readers of older reported decisions and briefs must recognize that "that authority makes for the plaintiff" is a term of advocacy meaning the cited case supports the plaintiff's position, not that the case was produced or created by the plaintiff.
Historical dictionaries sometimes treat "to make" under the Latin root facere, so researchers consulting Latin-language sources or early civil law materials should look under that heading. Cross-referencing Facere and Facit (as Burrill signals) is necessary for complete research on compound phrases in civilian or mixed-jurisdiction contexts.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the most structured treatment, distinguishing the two primary senses: formal performance (doing in the form of law) and operative effect (making for a party). Burrill's examples — "make oath," "make default," "make the duel," "make a fine," "make law" — are drawn from medieval and early modern common law practice and reflect procedural categories that have either disappeared or transformed. The phrase "make the duel" refers to the obsolete trial by combat procedure; "make law" refers to compurgation, the oath-helper process abolished in England in 1833.
What historical dictionaries tend to underserve is the argumentative or evidentiary sense — "to make for." This usage persists in legal writing longer than the procedural compound phrases and shows up in judicial opinions well into the nineteenth century. Researchers should not assume the phrase is archaic simply because its companion procedural compounds have fallen out of use.
No meaningful divergence among historical sources has been identified for this term; its treatment is consistent where sources address it at all, which is infrequently given its purely functional character.