Definition
In Roman civil law, *accommodare* is a Latin verb meaning to accommodate, to allow by favor rather than strict legal right, or to lend. It appears in legal sources in two related but distinct senses:
1. EQUITABLE GRANT BY THE PRAETOR. An action or exception was said to be *accommodated* when the praetor extended it to a party or situation not strictly covered by the letter of the ius civile, acting instead on principles of equity and good conscience (*ex aequo et bono*). In this sense, *accommodare* describes the praetor's discretionary power to fashion relief where the rigid application of existing law would produce an unjust outcome.
2. TO LEND OR LOAN. *Accommodare* also means simply to lend a thing to another — to transfer temporary use of a thing as a matter of favor, without transferring ownership. This sense connects directly to the contract of *commodatum* (gratuitous loan for use), from which the verb shares its root.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To accommodate means to provide something needed, to make fit or suitable, or to adapt to the needs of another.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To accommodate means to render fit or suitable; to adapt; to supply with something needed; to furnish or oblige.
The gap between the common and legal meanings here is meaningful in one direction: the common English sense of accommodation — making room, supplying a need, adjusting to circumstance — roughly tracks the Roman legal sense, but strips away its technical procedural content. In Roman law, *accommodare* is not merely a general act of helpfulness; it describes a specific juristic act by a magistrate operating outside strict law, or a specific legal transaction (gratuitous loan). A researcher reading the term in a civil law source without this context might correctly intuit "flexibility" while missing the precise doctrinal mechanism being invoked.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is a navigational challenge precisely because it straddles procedure and contract. Researchers encountering *accommodare* in a Roman or civil law text must first identify which sense is operative — equitable praetorian extension or gratuitous loan — before connecting it to the right body of doctrine.
In the praetorian sense, *accommodare* is a functional cousin of *in factum actiones* and actiones utiles: tools by which the praetor stretched the reach of the civil law. Sources referencing Dig. 2.11.2.8 (on the praetor granting actions and exceptions *ex aequo et bono*) are working in this vein. Researchers working on the historical development of equity — including reception-era scholarship connecting Roman praetorian discretion to later chancery equity — will encounter this term as a marker of that tradition.
In the loan sense, *accommodare* appears in contexts that shade into or distinguish from *mutuum* (loan of consumables) and *commodatum* (loan of non-consumables for use). The fragment preserved in Burrill — *si tibi vendam quod tibi accommodavi* ("if I sell you that which I lent you") — illustrates a practical transaction question: what happens to a prior gratuitous loan when the lender subsequently sells the thing? This sits squarely in the law of obligations and property transfer.
Historical legal dictionaries (including Burrill) tend to present *accommodare* as a single entry with two meanings bundled together, which can obscure how different the procedural and contractual contexts are. A researcher following a citation from one context into the other risks category confusion.
The term also signals density of source-text dependency. *Accommodare* does not appear as a term of art in common law sources; it is strictly a civil law / Roman law term. Its presence in an English-language legal dictionary signals that the surrounding text is drawing on the civil or mixed civil-common law tradition. This is useful metadata for corpus navigation.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill's entry is concise and accurate: it correctly identifies both the equitable-extension sense (citing Calvin's *Lexicon Iuridicum* and the Digest) and the loan sense (with a fragment of Latin text). The entry is more a lexical gloss than a doctrinal analysis, which is appropriate for a term that functions as vocabulary rather than a freestanding legal concept.
The reference to *Calv. Lex.* (Johann Calvin's *Lexicon Iuridicum*, first published 1600) is characteristic of how Burrill handles civil law terms — routing researchers back to the standard humanist civil law lexicography rather than attempting original synthesis. This is reliable but means Burrill's entry on *accommodare* reflects 17th-century civilian interpretation filtered through 19th-century American lexicography.
What Burrill does not address: the relationship between *accommodare* in the praetorian sense and the broader structure of the praetor's *album* (edict), or how the term functions in the medieval learned law (canon law and ius commune) that transmitted Roman concepts to early modern Europe. Researchers whose materials postdate the classical Roman period should not assume that *accommodare* carries exactly the same weight in glossators, canonists, or early modern civilians as it does in Justinian's Digest.
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Jurisdictional Note
This is a Roman and civil law term with no direct common law equivalent. It appears in American legal materials primarily in the context of civil law scholarship, Louisiana law (with its civil law heritage), and historical jurisprudence. Researchers working in jurisdictions with strong Roman-Dutch, Spanish, or French legal traditions may encounter it in foundational texts.
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