acquiescence

(ăk'wē-ĕs'əns)

1. Passive assent or agreement without protest.
2. The state of being acquiescent.

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noun

1. The act or process of accepting: acceptance, agreement, assent, consent, nod, yes. Informal OK. See accept/reject.
2. The quality or state of willingly carrying out the wishes of others: amenability, amenableness, compliance, compliancy, deference, obedience, submission, submissiveness, tractability, tractableness. See resist/yield.

Definition: reluctant agreement
Antonyms: disagreement, insubordination, rebellion

1. An act of concurrence by adjoining property owners which resolves a boundary dispute or establishes a common boundary, where the definite or more accurate position of same has not or cannot be defined by survey.
2. The tacit consent of one owner, by not interposing a formal objection, to what might be an encroachment by an adjoining property owner over a questionable boundary.

Conduct recognizing the existence of a transaction and intended to permit the transaction to be carried into effect; a tacit agreement; consent inferred from silence.

For example, a new beer company is concerned that the proposed label for its beer might infringe on the trademark of its competitor. It submits the label to its competitor's general counsel, who does not object to its use. The new company files an application in the Patent Office to register the label as its trademark and starts to use the label on the market. The competitor does not file any objection in the Patent Office. Several years later, the competitor sues the new company for infringing on its trademark and demands an accounting of the new company's profits for the years it has been using the label. A court will refuse the accounting, since by the competitor's acquiescence, it tacitly approved the use of the label. The competitor, however, might be entitled to an injunction barring the new company from further use of its trademark if it is so similar to the competitor's label as to amount to an infringement.

Acquiescence is not the same as laches, a failure to do what the law requires to protect one's rights, under circumstances misleading or prejudicing the person being sued. Acquiescence relates to inaction during the performance of an act. The failure of the competitor's general counsel to object to the use of the label and to the registration of the label as a trademark in the Patent Office is acquiescence. Failure to sue the company until after several years had elapsed from the first time the label had been used is laches.

Look up acquiescence in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Acquiescence is a legal term used to describe an act where a person knowingly stands by without raising any objection to the infringement of their rights, while someone else unknowingly and without malice aforethought makes a claim on their rights. Consequently, the person whose rights are infringed loses the ability to make a claim against the infringer, or succeed in an injunction suit due to the infringer's conduct. The term is most generally "permission" given by silence or passiveness. Acceptance or agreement by keeping quiet or by not making objections.

Overview

The common law doctrine of estoppel by acquiescence is applied when one party gives legal notice to a second party of a fact or claim, and the second party fails to challenge or refute that claim within a reasonable time. The second party is said to have acquiesced to the claim, and is estopped from later challenging it, or making a counterclaim. The doctrine is similar to, and often applied with, estoppel by laches.

This occurred in the second Georgia v. South Carolina^[1] case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992, when it was ruled that Georgia could no longer make any claim to an island in the Savannah River, despite the 1787 Treaty of Beaufort's assignment to the contrary. The court said that the state had knowingly allowed South Carolina to join the island as a peninsula to its own coast by dumping sand from dredging, and to then levy property taxes on it for decades. Georgia thereby lost the island-turned-peninsula by its own acquiescence, even though the treaty had given it all of the islands in the river (see adverse possession).

The doctrine of acquiescence although typically not found in law, is found a lot in precedent. As seen by this search of US Supreme Court rulings, the doctrine of acquiescence has been mentioned over a thousand times.

Silence is acquiescence (aka. silent acquiescence and acquiescence by silence) is a related doctrine that can mean, and have the legal effect, that when confronted with a wrong or an act that can be considered a tortious act, where one’s silence may mean that one accepts or permits such acts without protest or claim thereby loses rights to a claim of any loss or damage.^[2]

References

1. ^ http://supreme.justia.com/us/497/376/index.html
2. ^ U.S. Supreme Court Central Pacific Railway Co. v. Alameda County, 284 U.S. 463 (1932)

• United States Supreme Court rulings that mention acquiescence
• Legal dictionary on acquiescence

See also

• Nonacquiescence, an unrelated legal doctrine

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