Definition
In Spanish law, a right of action; also, the procedural method by which a party seeks judicial recovery of property or a debt. The term encompasses both the substantive entitlement to pursue a claim and the procedural mechanism through which that claim is advanced in court.
---
Why It Matters in Research
ACOION is a Spanish civil law term of limited scope in English-language legal sources. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in materials touching on Spanish colonial law, early Southwestern United States jurisprudence, or civil law jurisdictions with Spanish legal heritage — including Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, and Florida, particularly in materials predating American statehood or from the early territorial period.
The term should not be treated as interchangeable with the common law ACTION. The Spanish civil law tradition from which ACOION derives conceives of the right of action and the procedural vehicle as more unified concepts than common law jurisdictions do. A researcher applying common law assumptions about the separation of substantive rights and procedural remedies to sources using this term risks misreading the nature of the claim being described.
When working in Black's 2nd Edition or similar early American legal dictionaries, the presence of this term signals that the document or case under review may be drawing on Spanish colonial legal authority rather than English common law precedent. This distinction carries real weight in property and debt recovery cases from the Southwest, where competing legal traditions governed simultaneously during transitional periods.
The parenthetical reference in Black's to Escriche, *Diccionario Razonado de Legislación y Jurisprudencia* (cited at page 49) points researchers toward Joaquín Escriche's authoritative Spanish legal dictionary as the foundational source for this term. That work, though in Spanish, remains the primary scholarly reference for Spanish civil law terminology and is available in research collections focused on comparative or colonial law.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the primary English-language treatment of this term, defining it concisely as both a right of action and a method of judicial procedure for recovery of property or a debt under Spanish law, with attribution to Escriche. The entry is notably brief, which is consistent with the term's narrow scope in English-language legal practice.
No broader development of the term appears in English legal dictionaries of the period. Black's does not elaborate on subtypes of ACOION, though Spanish legal tradition recognizes various categories of action under this umbrella. Researchers should not take the compressed dictionary entry as evidence that the term was simple or uniform in its original context — Escriche's own treatment is considerably more detailed.
The maxim appended immediately after the ACOION entry in Black's — *Accipere quid ut justitiam facias, non est tam accipere quam extorquere* ("To accept anything as a reward for doing justice is rather extorting than accepting," citing Lofft 72) — is a separate entry that appears adjacent in the alphabetical sequence and is not part of the definition of ACOION itself.
---
Jurisdictional Note
This term is relevant primarily in jurisdictions with Spanish colonial legal heritage, including former Spanish and Mexican territories that became U.S. states. Courts in Texas and California occasionally encountered Spanish law concepts in early land grant and debt disputes, and the term may appear in archival legal documents from those periods without translation or explanation.
---