Definition
"Ation" is not a legal term. It is a Latin-derived suffix used in English and legal Latin to form abstract nouns from verbs, indicating an action, process, condition, or result. It appears in hundreds of legal terms — consideration, alienation, ratification, subrogation, novation, indemnification — but has no independent legal meaning of its own.
As a standalone entry, "ation" has no recognized definition in legal dictionaries, statutes, or case law.
Why It Matters in Research
This entry exists as a placeholder or indexing artifact. Researchers encountering "ATION" as a headword in a historical legal dictionary index or corpus should treat it as a corrupt, truncated, or misalphabetized entry — most likely a fragment of a longer term (e.g., EXPORTATION, ALIENATION, RATIFICATION) that was separated from its root during transcription, typesetting, or optical character recognition.
The source material provided to generate this entry illustrates the problem directly: the Rapalje & Lawrence material associated with this headword is actually content from EXPORTATION, and the Anderson's material is drawn from FAILURE OF ISSUE or FAILURE OF JUSTICE — neither of which has any relation to a suffix. This is a digitization or indexing error, not a genuine legal concept.
Researchers working with Law Mind's historical corpus should be alert to this class of artifact, particularly when:
- Working with scanned historical dictionaries where alphabetical headers or running titles were captured as headwords.
- Using keyword or substring searches that return suffix fragments rather than complete terms.
- Encountering entries where the sourced content does not match the headword — a reliable signal that the entry is corrupt.
If you arrived at this entry seeking a term that ends in "-ation," search for the full term directly.
Historical Dictionary Support
Neither Rapalje & Lawrence nor Anderson's Dictionary of Law contains a genuine entry for "ation" as a legal term. The fragments surfaced under this headword belong to other entries. Rapalje & Lawrence's material references EXPORTATION and its meaning in U.S. statutes, bonds, and English statutory construction. Anderson's material references failure of issue (want of descendants capable of taking under an executory devise) and failure of justice (defeat of right from want of legal remedy). These are substantive entries in their own right and should be consulted under their correct headwords.
No historical legal dictionary in the Anglo-American tradition defines "-ation" as a term of art.