Definition
In French law, the formal document by which a civil action or suit is commenced — the procedural instrument that initiates litigation by summoning the opposing party to appear. It is the functional equivalent of the English writ of summons. In some cases under French practice, proceedings were instead initiated by requête (petition), making the ajournment one of several possible entry points into civil litigation rather than the universal starting mechanism.
The term is a French legal term of art that appeared in English-language legal dictionaries primarily to assist practitioners and scholars working with French or mixed civil-law materials, comparative law sources, or historical documents from jurisdictions influenced by French procedure.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Adjournment" (the anglicized spelling) means the suspension or postponement of a meeting, session, or proceeding to a later time or place.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1813): "Adjournment" — the act of adjourning; the putting off or deferring of business to another day or time.
The gap here is significant and runs in two directions. First, the spelling: "ajournment" (without the initial "d") is the French-derived form, whereas "adjournment" is the anglicized term meaning something entirely different — a postponement or suspension of proceedings. Second, the meanings are essentially opposite in procedural effect: ajournment starts a proceeding; adjournment suspends or closes one. A researcher encountering "ajournment" in an English-language legal source is not reading a variant spelling of "adjournment" — the terms describe categorically different procedural acts.
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Common Confusion
AJOURNMENT vs. ADJOURNMENT: These words are visually similar and share a common French root (ajourner, to assign a day), but they describe opposite procedural events. Ajournment initiates proceedings; adjournment suspends or terminates them. The risk of conflation is highest in older English-language texts, comparative law materials, and documents from Louisiana or Quebec jurisdictions where French legal terminology intersected with Anglo-American practice. Always verify spelling and jurisdictional context before treating these as interchangeable.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "ajournment" almost exclusively in one of three contexts: (1) English-language legal dictionaries glossing French civil procedure for comparative purposes, (2) historical materials from civil-law jurisdictions or mixed-law systems such as Louisiana, Quebec, or pre-Americanization territories, and (3) translations of French legal texts.
The critical research trap is the near-homophone problem with "adjournment." In digitized historical sources and OCR-processed texts, the distinction between "ajournment" and "adjournment" can be lost through transcription error, and even careful human copyists have conflated the two. A document that appears to say proceedings were "adjourned" may in fact be recording that they were initiated. Verify against original sources wherever the procedural posture is consequential.
Because Black's 2nd Edition defines ajournment by reference to French mercantile law (Arg. Fr. Merc. Law), researchers following this term into primary sources will need access to French legal materials or secondary scholarship on French civil procedure. The term has no direct operational life in American or English common-law practice — it surfaces in Anglo-American legal dictionaries as a translation aid, not as a term of domestic law.
Corpus researchers should also note that ajournment belongs to a cluster of French procedural terms that appear in English legal dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries without being naturalized into common-law practice. These terms are markers of comparative and commercial law scholarship rather than practicing-lawyer vocabulary.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only entry in the Law Mind corpus for this term. The definition is spare but precise: ajournment is the initiating document in French civil litigation, equated to the English writ of summons, with the noted qualification that some actions were commenced by requête instead.
The reference to "Arg. Fr. Merc. Law, 545" points to a treatise on French mercantile law that Black's used as a source for French legal terminology — a reminder that English-language legal dictionaries of this era were actively curating French commercial and procedural terms for practitioners involved in transatlantic trade.
No other historical dictionaries in the corpus define ajournment, which itself is instructive: the term did not achieve sufficient domestic currency to warrant independent treatment across multiple sources. Its presence in Black's is best understood as lexicographic completeness in a dictionary that aspired to cover civil-law and comparative-law terminology alongside common-law doctrine.
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Jurisdictional Note
Ajournment is a term of French civil procedure with no direct equivalent function in American or English common law. It may appear in Louisiana legal materials, particularly from the 19th century, given that state's civil-law heritage, and in comparative law scholarship. Researchers working in Quebec legal history will encounter both French-language and anglicized versions of the term in their proper procedural context.
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