Definition
Valuable consideration is a category of legal consideration consisting of something that the law recognizes as having real, measurable worth — money, goods, services, a promise exchanged, or marriage when prospective — given in exchange for a grant, promise, or conveyance. It stands in contrast to good consideration, which rests on natural love and affection or blood relationship and is generally insufficient to support a contract or defeat the claims of creditors and subsequent purchasers for value.
The significance of the distinction is primarily transactional and protective: a transferee who gives valuable consideration and has no notice of a prior defect or competing claim typically receives superior protection under property and commercial law. A donee who receives property based only on good consideration — the generosity of a parent toward a child, for example — may be vulnerable to being displaced by a creditor of the transferor or a subsequent bona fide purchaser.
Valuable consideration need not be adequate in amount. The law does not ordinarily inquire whether the parties made a good bargain; it asks only whether something of recognized legal value passed. A dollar can be valuable consideration for a conveyance of land, though extreme disproportion may raise questions of fraud or unconscionability as separate matters.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "An equivalent or compensation having value given for a thing purchased, such as money, marriage, services, etc."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No distinct entry; the phrase was treated as a legal term of art and not separately defined in general dictionaries of the period.
Editorial note: The Wiktionary definition is closer to the legal meaning than most common-language entries, but it omits the critical structural point: valuable consideration is defined against its counterpart, good consideration. A researcher approaching this term from ordinary English will likely grasp the money-and-services core but miss the legal weight the distinction carries in conveyancing, fraud on creditors, and bona fide purchaser doctrine.
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Common Confusion
VALUABLE CONSIDERATION vs. GOOD CONSIDERATION: These are not synonyms and should not be used interchangeably. Good consideration — blood, natural love, and affection — was historically sufficient to support a voluntary conveyance between family members but afforded the recipient no protection against the grantor's creditors and was insufficient to support most contracts. Valuable consideration carries that protective weight. Some older sources use "good consideration" loosely to mean adequate or sufficient consideration; context is essential when reading pre-twentieth-century materials.
VALUABLE CONSIDERATION vs. ADEQUATE CONSIDERATION: Adequacy concerns whether the consideration was fair in amount or proportion to what was received. Valuable consideration concerns only whether the law recognizes what was given as belonging to a legally cognizable category of worth. A grossly inadequate price is still valuable consideration; it is not adequate consideration. Courts and statutes — particularly in fraudulent transfer contexts — sometimes require adequate valuable consideration, compounding both concepts.
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Why It Matters in Research
The valuable/good consideration distinction saturates pre-twentieth-century property and equity sources but is less visible in modern contract law, where the operative question is simply whether enforceable consideration exists at all. Researchers working in conveyancing history, Statute of Elizabeth fraudulent conveyance cases, or equity doctrine around voluntary settlements need to track this distinction carefully; it does not map cleanly onto modern consideration doctrine.
In the Law Mind corpus, the distinction appears most heavily in property transfer materials, equity treatises, and early commercial law sources. Contract cases from the late nineteenth century onward may use "valuable consideration" as loose shorthand for "sufficient consideration," blurring the categorical line. When reading older equity decisions — particularly those addressing competing claims between donees and creditors — the valuable/good distinction is doing structural work and must be read precisely.
Marriage as valuable consideration is a recurring point of complexity. Historically, marriage was valuable consideration only when the conveyance was made in contemplation of and prior to or contemporaneous with the marriage. A post-marriage settlement supported only by past marriage — already completed — presented contested authority. Burrill flags this directly. Researchers encountering marriage-settlement disputes should verify the timing sequence before characterizing the consideration.
Rapalje & Lawrence's citations remain useful entry points into the nineteenth-century American case law on what qualifies and what does not. The citation cluster around Baldwin's U.S. Reports and Peters reflects the federal equity courts' treatment of the doctrine in property disputes.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the core definition but vary in depth. Black's (both editions) defines valuable consideration by contrast: it is what good consideration is not. The formulation — money, marriage that is to follow, or the like, which the law esteems an equivalent — tracks Blackstone's Commentaries closely, and Burrill cites Blackstone's 2 Bl. Com. 297 directly. This lineage is useful: the definition was largely stable from Blackstone through the late nineteenth century, and researchers can treat the historical sources as reliable for the categorical distinction even when modern sources have moved on from it.
Bouvier simply redirects to CONSIDERATION without independent treatment, reflecting the reality that by Bouvier's time the term was understood as a sub-category rather than a freestanding doctrine. Rapalje & Lawrence takes the opposite approach, offering a dense case-citation cluster without expository definition — useful as a research index, not a definitional source.
None of the historical dictionaries fully address the adequacy/valuable distinction or the treatment of nominal consideration, which is where modern contract litigation concentrates. For those questions, the historical sources are incomplete and should be supplemented with twentieth-century authority.
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Jurisdictional Note
The valuable/good consideration distinction survives most clearly in property and fraudulent transfer law, where statutory language — including the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act and its successor, the Uniform Voidable Transactions Act — uses "reasonably equivalent value" rather than the common-law vocabulary. Researchers should not assume that "valuable consideration" in a modern statute carries the same meaning as in an eighteenth or nineteenth-century conveyancing case.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Contracts — Adequacy of Consideration and Nominal Consideration (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)
Contracts — Past Consideration and Moral Obligation (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia)
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