Definition
A term from French commercial law meaning cargo or lading — that is, the full complement of goods loaded aboard a vessel for transport. The term encompasses everything placed on a ship as freight, equivalent in meaning to the English maritime term "cargo" or "lading." Encountered in English-language legal sources primarily as a foreign law reference or in the analysis of French marine insurance and commercial codes.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in admiralty law, marine insurance history, or comparative commercial law will encounter this term when reading treatises or cases that engage with French maritime practice. Its appearance in an English-language legal document is almost always a signal that the drafter was drawing on French commercial law, citing a French authority, or analogizing to the French system — particularly in the context of marine insurance disputes, cargo claims, or bills of lading.
The term is not a live term of art in modern American or British legal practice; it functions as a historical and comparative reference. Researchers should not expect to find it in statutes or modern case law but should watch for it in 18th- and 19th-century admiralty treatises and in scholarship engaging with the Code de Commerce or French marine ordinances. Misreading it as a term of English domestic law would be an error; its presence points outward, toward a French legal source or framework.
In Law Mind's corpus, sightings of cargaison in English-language materials are most productively read as entry points into comparative maritime law research rather than as independent authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Burrill's — agree precisely: cargaison is French commercial law terminology for cargo or lading. There is no divergence on meaning. The definitions are minimal, reflecting the term's status as a foreign-law gloss rather than an independently developed common-law concept.
Burrill's adds meaningful depth by providing the parenthetical tout ce qui est chargé — "all that which is loaded" — which clarifies the term's scope as encompassing the entirety of a ship's freight. Burrill's also cites Emerigon's Traité des Assurances (ch. 10, sect. 1), placing the term in the context of marine insurance law. Balthazard-Marie Emerigon's 18th-century treatise was among the most authoritative works on marine insurance in the civil law world and was widely consulted by English and American admiralty courts. That citation is the most substantive navigational clue the historical dictionaries provide: researchers seeking the operative legal context for cargaison should consult Emerigon, not English common law sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not provide is any account of how cargaison functioned within French law — whether its scope differed from the English "cargo" in legally significant ways, how it interacted with French insurance valuation rules, or how courts resolved disputes over what goods fell within a cargaison. Researchers needing that depth must move beyond these dictionary entries to the French sources directly.