commonwealth

The public or common weal or welfare. This cannot be regarded as a technical term of public law, though often used in political science. It generally designates, when so employed, a republican frame of government,-one in which the welfare and rights of the entire mass of people are the main consideration, rather than the privileges of a class or the will of a monarch; or it may designate the body of citizens living under such a government. Sometimes it may denote the corporate entity, or the government, of a jural society (or state) possessing powers of self-government in respect of its immediate concerns, but forming an integral part of a larger government (or nation). In this latter sense, it is the official title of several of the United States (as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Kentucky), and would be appropriate to them all. In the former sense, the word was used to designate the English government during the protectorate of Cromwell. Any of the individual States of the United States and the body of people constituting a state or politically organized community, a body politic, hence, a state, especially one constituted by a number of persons united by compact or tacit agreement under one form of government and system of laws. Detres v. Lions Bldg. Corp., C.A.I11., 234 F.2d 596, 600.

See government

- nation

- state