Definition
A judgment, sentence, or decree issued by a court of competent jurisdiction. The term derives from French law and appears in civil law jurisdictions and legal materials from Canada and Louisiana. In its fullest historical sense, an arret could refer either to a judicial decision rendered by a court or parliament, or to a royal ordinance or decree issued by sovereign authority. The phrase saisie arret denotes a specific procedural device — the attachment of property held by a third party — and functions roughly as the civil law equivalent of garnishment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alternative form of arrêt — the standard French word for a stop, halt, or judicial decision.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A judgment, decision, or decree of a court or high tribunal; also a decree of a sovereign. An arrest; a legal seizure.
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but worth flagging for researchers: in ordinary modern English, "arret" is rarely encountered outside historical or French-language legal contexts. The anglicized spelling without the circumflex accent signals a term of art borrowed into common law legal writing, not simply the French word transliterated. Researchers encountering it in English-language sources should treat it as a term of civil law provenance, not a generic synonym for "arrest" in the criminal sense.
Common Confusion
Arret and arrest share a root and overlap in older usage — Burrill notes that "arret" could mean to seize a vessel — but the two terms diverge sharply in modern legal practice. Arrest in modern common law refers to the detention of a person by legal authority. Arret, by contrast, refers primarily to a judicial or sovereign decree and has no continuing technical use in common law criminal procedure. Researchers working in colonial or early American materials should be alert to this overlap; the seizing function of arret (particularly as applied to vessels) survived longer in admiralty and civil law contexts than in general criminal law usage.
Why It Matters in Research
Arret is a term of civil law origin that migrated into English-language legal materials primarily through Louisiana and Canadian sources. Researchers should note several navigational points:
First, the term appears with and without the circumflex accent (arrêt / arret) depending on the source and era. Searches in digitized historical sources should account for both spellings; OCR errors may further degrade the diacritical mark.
Second, in Louisiana materials the term carries genuine technical weight. Louisiana's civil law tradition inherited arret directly from French jurisprudence, and saisie arret as an attachment mechanism has a distinct procedural history traceable through the Louisiana Code of Practice. Researchers analyzing Louisiana attachment law should treat arret as a term with substantive content, not merely a French synonym for "judgment."
Third, in non-Louisiana common law sources, arret appears almost exclusively in historical or comparative law discussions. Its presence in a document is often itself a signal that the author was drawing on civil law or French Canadian authority.
Fourth, Burrill's note that the word was applied to the seizure of a vessel (navem arrestavit) connects arret to admiralty practice, where civil law influence on English courts was historically significant. Researchers in admiralty history may encounter the term in this narrower seizure sense.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill and Black's agree on the core meaning — a judicial decree or judgment — and both acknowledge the term's French derivation and civil law context. Black's is more precise in anchoring the term to Louisiana and Canadian usage with specific code references, which is useful for researchers seeking primary sources. Burrill adds the royal ordinance dimension and the vessel-seizure usage, reflecting the term's broader historical range before it narrowed in anglophone legal writing. Both sources are silent on the term's disappearance from active common law usage, which is itself informative: arret was never fully naturalized into English common law, and its appearance in any English-language source after the early nineteenth century is likely a deliberate civil law reference rather than general usage.
Jurisdictional Note
Arret carries continuing relevance primarily in Louisiana and Quebec legal materials. In Louisiana, saisie arret as an attachment mechanism reflects the state's civil law heritage and requires treatment distinct from common law garnishment doctrine. In common law jurisdictions outside Louisiana, the term is historical and comparative rather than operative.