Definition
In civil law, a written acknowledgment of payment — a receipt or acquittance given by a creditor to a debtor confirming that a sum of money has been paid. The apocha does not release the underlying obligation except insofar as actual payment has been made; it is evidence that payment occurred, not a surrender of the claim itself.
Common Confusion
Apocha is frequently confused with acceptilation, a related but distinct civil law concept. Acceptilation is a formal verbal release of a debt that discharges the obligation entirely, whether or not payment was actually made — it operates as a fictional satisfaction. Apocha, by contrast, discharges the obligation only to the extent that real payment has in fact been rendered. A creditor who issues an apocha has acknowledged receipt of money; a creditor who grants acceptilation has forgiven the debt outright. The distinction matters when tracing partial payments, novations, or the survival of a debt after a document of release appears in the record.
Why It Matters in Research
Apocha is primarily a term of Roman and civil law, and researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in sources rooted in that tradition: Louisiana law, Scots law, Quebec law, Spanish colonial legal instruments, and historical treatises drawing on the Corpus Juris Civilis. It does not appear as a functioning term in common law jurisdictions.
In historical documents — particularly Spanish colonial land grants, notarial records, and early Louisiana conveyances — an apocha may appear as a recital within a larger instrument, acknowledging receipt of purchase price or debt payment. Researchers examining title chains or debt instruments in these jurisdictions should recognize that an apocha embedded in a deed or contract is a receipt clause, not a separate release of the obligation. Confusing it with a full acquittance or a novation can lead to misreading whether a debt survived the transaction.
The term also appears in ecclesiastical and canon law contexts, where written acknowledgments of payments to church institutions or of fees rendered were sometimes recorded using civil law vocabulary. Researchers working in those records should be alert to the same receipt-versus-release distinction.
One trap in historical sources: Burrill's entry is fragmentary and partially corrupted in transmission, mixing apocha with a marginal annotation on petition responses. Researchers should not rely on Burrill alone for this term. Black's 2nd edition provides the cleanest and most reliable short definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 2nd edition is the most useful of the three sources here. It correctly identifies the term's civil law origin and draws the critical line between apocha and acceptilation with reference to Calvin's legal lexicon — a standard authority for Roman law terminology.
Burrill's entry is unfortunately garbled, apparently combining material from multiple headwords. The passage referencing marginal annotations and petition responses does not belong to apocha and appears to be a printing or editorial error in the source text. The substantive content Burrill does supply — describing apocha as an acquittance or discharge given by a creditor to a debtor upon payment — is accurate but incomplete, and the fragmentary state of the entry makes it unreliable for citation purposes.
The Black's 1st edition entry reproduced in the source material above appears to be misattributed — the text describing "followers or dependents of the ancient German chiefs" belongs to a different headword (likely ANTRUSTIONS or a similar Frankish legal term) and was apparently captured in error. Researchers should disregard that passage entirely in connection with apocha.
All functional sources agree on the core meaning: written acknowledgment of payment in civil law, distinct from a full release of obligation.
Jurisdictional Note
Apocha as a technical term is operative in civil law jurisdictions. Louisiana courts and treatises have used it in the context of notarial practice and debt instruments. Researchers working in common law jurisdictions will encounter it only in historical comparative law materials or in treatises surveying Roman law sources.