Is the use of "hereby" ever essential? I get the feeling it is always superfluous. "As a result of this document or utterance" seems to be trivially true. For example:
I hereby declare that what I am uttering has meaning.
Why would I utter something in an authoritative context if I don't intend for said utterance to have a result? Why would I put instructions or a definition in a document if I did not really intend to define something?
Again:
It is defined that to 'discard' a command is to [place that command in an omelet and surrender that omelet to the duck army].
Even if my new definition of 'discard' is totally out of sync with the normal meaning of 'discard', the sentence is still clear and has the same meaning as if I had written "it is hereby defined that…".
Even the example sentence given by Google confounds me:
"the Port Authority hereby solicits proposals from developers"
If "hereby" was deleted from that sentence, would it really have a different meaning? The Port Authority is clearly soliciting proposals about whatever gives that sentence context. Maybe the Port Authority doesn't normally solicit proposals, but now it does now because it was written there, not because it was "hereby" written.
Best Answer
I was interested to discover that the voluminous, unabridged Black's Law Dictionary (1968) doesn't have an entry for hereby. The reason for the omission, evidently, is that—contrary to popular belief—hereby has no special legal meaning.
It follows that the use of hereby in legal and quasi-legal notices means nothing more nor less than what a general dictionary says it means. Here is the brief entry for the word in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003):
A notice published in a local newspaper announcing one's candidacy for public office might be worded like this one, from the [Kingstree, South Carolina] County Record (August 26, 1920):
Or like any of the other 51 such announcements on the same page of that newspaper, along with one iconoclastic announcement to the contrary:
In all of these instances, "hereby" means something like "by publishing this announcement in this newspaper." You might argue that the reader, being uniquely well situated to observe that the announcement is indeed in the particular newspaper in front of him or her, doesn't need to be told more than "I announce myself a candidate..." But I think it is inaccurate to infer that the "hereby" is therefore superfluous. Interpreted literally, the notifications indicate that each such candidacy had not, until announced in the newspaper, been announced publicly at all. So at least on its face, "hereby" conveys the information "by this means and by no other."