Definition
"To market," as a legal term of art, appears primarily in instruments of conveyance, trust, and testamentary disposition — particularly in grants of power to a trustee, executor, or life tenant. When such an instrument authorizes a fiduciary or beneficiary "to market" property, it confers authority to sell, dispose of, or otherwise alienate the subject property in the ordinary course, typically at a price reflective of prevailing market conditions. The phrase signals an affirmative grant of dispositive authority rather than a mere descriptive reference to commercial activity.
In older instruments, the phrase commonly appeared alongside related powers — to sell, to lease, to exchange — as part of a bundled enumeration of trustee or executor powers. Its presence was read as expanding, not limiting, those powers by implying that the holder could pursue sale through normal commercial channels without seeking separate court authorization.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "To market" means to advertise or promote goods or services to potential buyers; to bring a product before the public for sale.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To deal in a market; to buy or sell; to make bargains for provisions or goods."
The gap between common and legal meaning is meaningful. In ordinary usage, "to market" centers on promotion and advertising — the activity preceding a sale. In legal instruments, particularly wills and trust deeds, the phrase operates as a term of granted authority, meaning to sell and dispose of outright. A trustee authorized "to market" property has not merely been told to advertise it; the phrase historically carried the full weight of a power of sale.
---
Common Confusion
The phrase should not be confused with the narrower modern commercial-law concept of "placing goods on the market" for purposes of products liability or regulatory compliance, where "marketing" describes a triggering act (first commercial distribution) rather than an ongoing authority. Nor should it be read as equivalent to "to lease" or "to manage": historical instruments frequently distinguished these powers, and the presence of "to market" without "to lease" was sometimes argued to restrict a fiduciary to outright disposition only. Researchers should also take care not to conflate the phrase with modern securities or energy regulatory usage, where "to market" or "marketing" carries its own technical regulatory meaning distinct from property-instrument usage.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "to market" in historical instruments face two principal traps.
First, the phrase is sparse in dedicated legal dictionary treatment. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is fragmentary — appearing amid a cluster of similar phrase-entries ("to my family," "to my present physician," "to my relation," "to sell and dispose of at her") — which signals that the phrase was treated as a recognized term of art whose meaning was assumed rather than elaborated. This means you will rarely find a full definition in period dictionaries; you must reconstruct meaning from instrument context and surrounding authority.
Second, the weight of the phrase shifted across time. In early American and English practice, "to market" in a fiduciary instrument could be construed broadly to include the full range of dispositive acts — sale at auction, private sale, sale on terms. In later practice, as drafting became more precise, instruments tended to spell out specific powers individually, and "to market" either disappeared from instrument language or was demoted to a looser, more promotional sense. A researcher examining a nineteenth-century trust instrument should read the phrase as a substantive power grant; the same phrase in a mid-twentieth-century instrument may carry only its colloquial commercial meaning.
For corpus researchers, the term also appears in judicial construction cases where courts were asked to determine whether a power "to market" authorized a particular mode of disposition (e.g., whether it permitted installment sales, exchange transactions, or sale below appraised value). Those cases turn heavily on surrounding instrument language and period drafting conventions — context that must be recovered from the instrument itself rather than from the dictionary entry alone.
In energy and commodities regulation, the phrase has an entirely separate modern life. FERC and related regulatory frameworks use "to market" in the sense of a utility or generator's authority to sell power at market-based rates — a regulatory authorization concept with no meaningful connection to the historical property-instrument usage. Researchers should treat these as distinct terms sharing a surface form.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence present "to market" as a phrase-entry without extended definition, clustering it with other short-form instrument phrases. The entry's fragmentary condition is itself informative: it confirms the phrase was understood as a recognized term in the drafting lexicon of the period but was not thought to require extended explication in the way contested or ambiguous terms were treated. The implicit definition — to sell and dispose of — is consistent with the phrase's appearance in instruments granting a power of sale alongside or in lieu of more explicit formulations like "to sell and dispose of at her [discretion]," which appears in the same cluster.
Standard nineteenth-century American practice treatises on trusts and executors (e.g., Perry on Trusts, Hill on Trustees) discuss powers of sale at length but do not always itemize "to market" as a distinct term, treating it as subsumed within broader sale-power analysis. This gap in treatise coverage reinforces the dictionary evidence: the phrase was common enough to appear in instruments but specific enough in meaning that practitioners did not feel it required separate doctrinal elaboration.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The operative weight of "to market" in historical instruments varied by jurisdiction depending on whether courts construed fiduciary powers strictly (requiring explicit enumeration of each mode of sale) or liberally (reading any grant of sale authority to include all commercially reasonable methods). English equity courts and many early American courts leaned toward strict construction; later American courts, particularly in states with statutory trustee-powers acts, moved toward liberal construction that would render the phrase broadly enabling in any event.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Real Estate Transactions — Marketable Title Requirement (The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia)
UCC Article 2 — Cover and Market Price Damages (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)
Energy Regulation — FERC, Public Utilities, and Electricity Markets (The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia)
---