Definition
Advocation is a procedural mechanism in Scots law by which a cause is removed from an inferior court to a superior court before final judgment has been rendered in the inferior court. It functions as a form of interlocutory appeal, allowing a party to seek review by a higher tribunal without waiting for the lower court to conclude proceedings.
The term carries two additional meanings in historical and ecclesiastical usage:
(1) The act of pleading or advocacy on behalf of another — equivalent in older usage to what modern lawyers would call representation or argument.
(2) The right of presenting a candidate to a vacant church benefice — a sense now entirely displaced by the term advowson, which is the standard modern form for that concept.
In Scottish legal practice, advocation was initiated by a bill of advocation or letters of advocation issued from the superior court. It was most closely associated with review of criminal proceedings in the High Court of Justiciary and civil proceedings in the Court of Session.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Advocacy; the act of advocating or pleading. Also, the process of removing a cause from an inferior court to the supreme court.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of advocating or pleading; plea; advocacy." Webster also notes, with the citation to Jeremy Taylor, a theological application: intercession or pleading on behalf of another before God. It further flags the ecclesiastical property meaning as overlapping with advowson.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant in two directions. First, modern common usage has largely collapsed advocation into advocacy, treating the two as interchangeable — but in legal research, they are not. Advocation is a specific procedural device; advocacy is a general activity. Second, the ecclesiastical property meaning (right of presentation to a benefice) appears in both Wiktionary and Webster's but belongs properly to advowson, a distinct legal term. Researchers encountering advocation in historical sources must identify which of the three meanings is operative before drawing conclusions.
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Common Confusion
ADVOCATION vs. ADVOWSON: These terms share a common root and were used interchangeably in some early sources (Webster's 1913 explicitly notes advocation as an obsolete form of advowson). They are not synonyms in legal usage. Advowson is the English ecclesiastical property right — the right to present a clerk to a vacant benefice — and has a substantial body of common law doctrine attached to it. Advocation in its procedural sense is a creature of Scots law with no English common law equivalent. Researchers working in ecclesiastical law sources should default to advowson; researchers working in Scots procedural sources should use advocation.
ADVOCATION vs. APPEAL: Advocation and appeal are related but not identical. Bouvier and Burrill both describe advocation as equivalent to appeal in Scots law, but the mechanism is technically distinct: advocation removes a cause before final judgment, whereas an appeal typically follows it. In modern Scots practice, the supervisory jurisdiction of the Court of Session has largely absorbed functions once served by advocation, and the distinct label has diminished in practical use.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter advocation primarily in three contexts: Scottish legal history, English ecclesiastical property law (where it bleeds into advowson), and pre-modern theological writing (where it means intercession or pleading).
The procedural Scots law meaning is the dominant legal sense, but it is geographically and temporally bounded. It will not appear in English common law reports with this meaning, and it is largely absent from American legal sources. If you encounter advocation in an American legal text, the author almost certainly means advocacy in the general sense, not the Scots procedural device.
The historical conflation with advowson is a genuine trap. Sources predating the mid-nineteenth century — including Webster's 1913, which preserves older usage — treat advocation and advowson as variant spellings of the same word. When researching ecclesiastical patronage, church livings, or the right of presentation, always verify that the term is being used in the advowson sense before filing it under advocation doctrine.
Burrill's citation to Bell's Dictionary and Alison's Criminal Practice is useful: these are the primary Scottish sources that give the procedural definition its authoritative grounding. Researchers needing deeper treatment of the Scots procedural context should consult those works directly.
No significant corpus connections in the Law Mind Encyclopedia have been identified for this term. The Taxpayer Advocate Service entry flagged by automated matching is not relevant — the match is terminological noise, not substantive overlap.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core procedural definition: advocation moves a cause from an inferior to a superior court before final judgment. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier restrict themselves to the Scots law context. Burrill adds useful texture by characterizing it explicitly as an appeal and a process for procuring review, and by citing the authoritative Scottish sources.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is any treatment of the theological and ecclesiastical meanings that Webster's 1913 preserves. This is an appropriate omission for law dictionaries — those meanings are not operative legal concepts — but it means researchers relying solely on the legal dictionaries will miss the confusion risk when encountering the term in older non-legal sources.
None of the source dictionaries address the decline of advocation as a distinct procedural mechanism in modern Scottish practice, nor the extent to which its functions have been absorbed into other supervisory procedures. The silence is itself informative: these dictionaries capture a historical state of the doctrine.
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Jurisdictional Note
Advocation in its procedural sense is a Scots law concept with no direct English or American common law equivalent. English courts used distinct mechanisms (certiorari, prohibition) for similar purposes. Researchers working in American jurisdictions should treat advocation as a historical or comparative reference point only, not as operative procedure.
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