Definition
A Law French term meaning an abuttal or abutment — that is, the point at which one parcel of land meets or borders another, or the boundary line where a property terminates against an adjoining property, road, or natural feature. Used in older conveyancing and land description practice to identify the terminal boundaries of a tract.
Common Confusion
ABOUTISSEMENT is easily conflated with the related terms ABUTTAL and ABUTMENT, and in practice the three are used interchangeably in historical sources. The distinction, where one is drawn at all, is terminological rather than substantive: aboutissement is simply the Law French form of the same concept expressed in English as abuttal. Researchers encountering aboutissement in a document should treat it as equivalent to abuttal and consult the entry for that term.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early Anglo-American legal materials that drew on Law French conventions — primarily colonial-era deeds, French-influenced land grant records, and treatises written before Law French fell entirely out of professional use. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec-adjacent territories, or other jurisdictions with French civil law heritage may encounter aboutissement in original conveyancing documents where English equivalents were not substituted.
The practical research trap is terminological: a chain-of-title search or a boundary dispute tracing back to an early instrument may use aboutissement to describe what a modern surveyor would call a bearing-and-distance boundary or a call to an adjoiner. Misreading or ignoring the term can cause a researcher to miss the operative boundary description. Cross-referencing to ABUTTAL entries in the same corpus will generally resolve interpretive questions.
The term does not appear to have generated independent doctrinal development in American courts; it functions purely as a descriptive label in instrument drafting. Its significance is lexicographic and historical rather than legal-analytical.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries converge on the same definition without meaningful variation: an abuttal or abutment, rendered from Law French. Black's (both editions) and Burrill agree completely, with Burrill adding an explicit cross-reference to ABUT and ABUTTAL that confirms the synonymous relationship.
Black's (both editions) references Guyot's Répertoire Universel et Raisonné de Jurisprudence, a French legal encyclopedia, as further authority — signaling that the drafters understood the term as a borrowing from French legal practice rather than an independent English common law concept. This reference is notable because it is one of the few instances in early American legal dictionaries where a French civilian source is cited directly, suggesting the compilers recognized that full treatment of the term required consulting the French tradition from which it derived.
None of the historical dictionaries provide case law, statutory authority, or extended doctrinal discussion, which is consistent with the term's limited role as descriptive instrument language rather than a term of legal art with independent analytical content.
Jurisdictional Note
Most likely to appear in documents from Louisiana, the former French territories of the Mississippi Valley, and areas of the Northeast with French colonial land grant history. In common law jurisdictions without French heritage, the term is a rare archaism and will almost never appear outside of reprinted historical instruments.