Definition
A gratuitous loan for use — a contract under which one party delivers a specific thing to another for temporary use, without compensation, with the obligation to return that same thing (in specie) at the conclusion of the loan. The lender retains ownership throughout; the borrower acquires only the right to use the object for the agreed purpose or period. Because no payment changes hands, the transaction is gratuitous on the lender's side.
Accommodatum is a form of bailment, specifically the subcategory in which the bailor receives no benefit and the bailee receives the sole benefit of the arrangement. This asymmetry in benefit has traditionally governed the standard of care imposed on the borrower, who is held to a high duty — ordinary negligence or greater — precisely because the accommodation runs entirely in the borrower's favor.
Common Confusion
ACCOMMODATUM / COMMODATUM: These are the same legal concept under variant Latin forms. Researchers should not treat them as distinct categories. The commodatum form is somewhat more common in civil-law and comparative law writing; accommodatum appears more frequently in certain English-language common law treatises. Either term in an index points to the same bailment type.
ACCOMMODATUM / MUTUUM: Mutuum is a gratuitous loan of consumable goods — things that are used up and replaced by equivalent goods rather than returned in the same physical form (in specie). Accommodatum involves non-consumable goods returned as the identical object. The distinction matters doctrinally: mutuum transfers ownership, while accommodatum does not.
Why It Matters in Research
Accommodatum and commodatum are functionally identical terms in Anglo-American legal writing; researchers encountering either in historical sources are reading the same legal concept. The Latin root differs only in prefix, and historical treatise writers used both interchangeably. Failing to search both terms when working through older digests or indices will produce incomplete results.
The term appears almost exclusively in sources predating the twentieth century. Modern American and English legal writing has abandoned both Latinate forms in favor of "gratuitous loan for use" or simply subsumed the concept within the broader bailment framework. A researcher tracing the historical development of bailment law — particularly the graduated duty-of-care structure associated with Lord Holt's analysis in Coggs v. Bernard (1703) — will encounter accommodatum as a live doctrinal category in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century treatises. That case's classification of bailment types was directly organized around whether the arrangement was gratuitous or compensated, making accommodatum a named category with real legal consequences at that time.
In the Law Mind corpus, expect this term to appear in treatises on bailment, contracts, and Roman law reception rather than in case reporters or statutory material. Cross-reference searches under commodatum and gratuitous bailment will expand coverage significantly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law defines accommodatum concisely as "a loan for use without pay, the thing to be restored in specie" and identifies it as a species of bailment, explicitly equating it with commodatum. The entry is reliable as far as it goes but does not distinguish the doctrinal consequences — particularly the standard of care — that made the classification meaningful in practice.
Historical dictionaries generally treat accommodatum as a civil-law borrowing that found a home in common-law treatise writing through the influence of Roman law categories. The term reflects the broader effort by common law writers, particularly in the eighteenth century, to systematize bailment using Roman law taxonomy. Anderson's equation of accommodatum with commodatum is consistent across historical sources; no serious doctrinal divergence between the two terms appears in the corpus.
What historical dictionaries miss is the practical displacement of this term: by the late nineteenth century, even treatise writers were moving toward plain-English descriptions, and the Latinate form was becoming antiquarian. A researcher should treat accommodatum as a term of historical art rather than a living legal category.
Jurisdictional Note
The term has no significant independent life in modern American or English statutory law. In civil law jurisdictions, commodatum is the operative term (see, e.g., civil codes derived from the Code Napoléon). Research into Louisiana law or comparative sources should default to commodatum.