Definition
"Cations" as a standalone legal term does not exist. The entry appearing under this heading in Black's Law Dictionary is a fragment — specifically, the tail end of the word "COMMUNICATIONS" from the preceding entry, PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATIONS. The "-cations" text is a typographical artifact of older print editions in which page breaks or column breaks caused entry text to run across pages, leaving an orphaned fragment that was indexed or reproduced as if it were an independent term.
The substantive legal concept described in the Black's fragment — confidential communications between persons in a fiduciary or confidential relationship that courts will not compel to be divulged — belongs entirely to the entry PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATIONS.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "CATIONS" as an apparent headword in digitized or transcribed versions of historical legal dictionaries should treat it as a scanning or transcription error, not a term of art. OCR processing of older multi-column legal dictionaries frequently generates false headwords by misreading hyphenated line breaks, page-turn fragments, or column overflow. If a search of the Law Mind corpus surfaces this term, the relevant content is found under PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATIONS, not here.
This is a known category of artifact in historical legal dictionary research: truncated entries, split headwords, and orphaned suffixes. When a supposed legal term has no independent meaning, no case law, and no doctrinal context, the first diagnostic step is to check whether it is the back half of a longer word from an adjacent entry.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary contains no intentional entry for "CATIONS." The text attributed to this headword — describing communications between persons in confidential or fiduciary relationships as protected from compelled disclosure in court — is the definition of PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATIONS. Black's treatment of that doctrine reflects the established common-law principle that certain relational communications (attorney-client, clergy-penitent, spousal) are shielded from judicial inquiry on grounds of public policy. The fragment here adds nothing to that analysis and should not be cited as authority for any independent proposition.