Definition
In legal usage, "volunteers" carries two distinct meanings:
1. EQUITY / PROPERTY: Persons who receive a conveyance of property without giving valuable consideration in return. A volunteer takes a gift rather than a bargained-for transfer. Courts of equity historically declined to assist volunteers who held defective or incomplete conveyances, on the principle that equity will not perfect an imperfect gift. The recipient of a purely gratuitous transfer stands in a weaker legal position than a purchaser for value and typically cannot compel a grantor to complete an imperfect conveyance.
2. MILITARY LAW: Persons who, during time of war or national emergency, offer their services to the armed forces without compulsion — as distinguished from conscripts or draftees who are compelled to serve by law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of volunteer — persons who freely offer their time or services, typically without pay, for a cause, organization, or activity.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who enters into service of his own free will, especially a soldier who enters service voluntarily rather than by compulsion.
The legal gap matters in the equity context. Ordinary usage captures the element of free will but misses the technical significance: in property law, being a "volunteer" is a term of art describing the absence of consideration, not merely the presence of willingness. A person can freely and eagerly receive a gift and still be a volunteer in the legal sense — what defines the status is what they gave (nothing of legal value), not their attitude.
Common Confusion
"Volunteers" in the equity sense is sometimes conflated with "gratuitous transferees" or loosely equated with "donees." The distinctions matter in research: a donee is typically the recipient of a completed gift, while a volunteer often describes the recipient of an attempted or defective gift — someone equity will not help to perfect the transfer. Separately, the military law meaning is historically and conceptually unrelated to the equity meaning; encountering the term in older legal texts requires attention to context to determine which usage applies.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
In the equity context, the volunteer principle intersects with:
— Volunteers under voluntary settlements: recipients of property arranged by deed of gift or settlement, without marriage or other valuable consideration passing.
— Volunteers in incomplete gifts: where a donor has attempted but not completed a transfer, leaving the intended recipient as a mere volunteer without enforceable rights at law or in equity (subject to narrow exceptions).
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with equity sources face two distinct traps. First, the equity rule against assisting volunteers is a default principle, not an absolute one. Bouvier's own entry gestures at exceptions; historical treatises such as Fonblanque's Equity develop these exceptions in some depth, and later equity jurisprudence recognized circumstances — including cases where the donor had done everything within their own power to complete the transfer — in which equity would intervene. Reading older sources that state the rule flatly risks missing its limits.
Second, the military law meaning dominated popular and some legal usage during wartime periods, particularly around the American Civil War when volunteer regiments were a central feature of military organization. Sources from that era using the term "volunteers" without context may be addressing military enlistment law entirely, not property or equity. The two usages are not distinguished by Bouvier's entry itself — they are simply juxtaposed — which is a small but real navigational hazard in the corpus.
For property researchers, the volunteer doctrine connects directly to the law of consideration, the enforceability of promises to make gifts, and the rules governing voluntary settlements and fraudulent conveyances. A transferee's status as a volunteer is also significant in priority disputes, since a subsequent purchaser for value without notice will typically defeat a prior volunteer.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is compact but structurally accurate on both meanings. Its equity definition is consistent with the general principle stated in Fonblanque and echoed in Powell on Mortgages: equity treats volunteers as occupying a disfavored position precisely because they have furnished no consideration to ground an equitable remedy. Bouvier's citation to Vesey's Chancery reports and Maddock's Chancery Practice points researchers toward the chancery tradition where this doctrine was most fully developed.
The entry's military law component is brief — Bouvier's text appears to be cut off in the surviving excerpt — but the core distinction between volunteers and conscripts was well established in military law of the period. What Bouvier's does not address, and what later legal development supplied, is the modern statutory and administrative overlay governing volunteer service in both military and civilian contexts, including the emergence of nonprofit and public-service volunteerism as a distinct legal category with its own liability and labor-law dimensions.
Jurisdictional Note
The equity principle disfavoring volunteers developed primarily in English chancery and was received broadly in American equity jurisprudence, but its application varies by state depending on how fully equity jurisdiction was preserved or codified. In civil law jurisdictions, analogous questions are addressed through the law of donations and liberalities rather than through the volunteer doctrine as such.