文档介绍：A Civil Law mon Law Dictionary
N. Stephan Kinsella*
(Version submitted to Louisiana Law Review; slightly edited version published in Vol. 54,
No. 5 (May 1994))
Alone in mon-law ocean of these United States, Louisiana is an island of civil law.
Louisiana’s civil law is embodied in the Louisiana Civil Code, much of the text of which was
derived in part from the Code of Napoleon of mon-law lawyers often
encounter Louisiana’s civilian terms and concepts when dealing with lawsuits or transactions in
Louisiana. No doubt they (and even Louisiana lawyers) are sometimes confused. How many
common-law lawyers know of naked owners, usufructs, virile portions, vulgar substitutions,
synallagmatic contracts, mystic testaments, antichresis, whimsical conditions, or lesion beyond
moiety? Even many Louisiana-trained attorneys are unfamiliar with terms such as amicable
compounder, jactitation, mutuum, modatum. Thus a dictionary of these and other civil law
terms e in handy to some practitioners.
In the main table below, various Louisiana civilian concepts are defined, and correlated with
common-law concepts where possible. The civilian terms defined in the table generally have some
counterpart mon-law terminology, are interesting or unique Louisiana civilian concepts, are
different uses of words than in mon law, or are simply used more often in Louisiana than in
her sister states.
Some of the Louisiana expressions discussed herein are monly in states other than
Louisiana. Similarly, common-law terminology is used increasingly in Louisiana as a result of the
influence of Louisiana’s 49 sister states, where civilian terminology should be properly used instead.
For example, mon-law term stare decisis is often used, erroneously, in Louisiana instead of
jurisprudence constante (see below); the civilian concept “immovable property” has been used in
Texas Therefore, many of the civil-law mon