Definition
A historical term for a tribunal exercising jurisdiction over maritime contracts, torts, injuries, and offenses. In American law, the term referred to a court of original admiralty jurisdiction — the body with authority to hear and decide cases arising on navigable waters, including disputes over shipping, cargo, salvage, and maritime wrongs. In the United States, this function was vested in the federal district courts, which served as the courts of original admiralty jurisdiction from the founding era forward.
The term is archaic and does not appear in modern legal usage. It survives principally in older treatises and historical legal dictionaries as a descriptor for admiralty tribunals in their early American form.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "cocets" in historical legal materials should treat it as a period-specific label for the admiralty jurisdiction of the federal district courts, not as a distinct or separate tribunal. The term appears in older maritime law treatises — including Parsons on Maritime Law — and may cause confusion for researchers unfamiliar with the layered appellate structure of early federal admiralty practice, under which causes could be removed from the district court to the circuit court and ultimately to the Supreme Court. That appellate pathway was substantially reorganized over the nineteenth century; sources predating those reforms will describe a procedural landscape that no longer exists.
When tracing admiralty jurisdiction in pre-twentieth-century sources, be alert to the fact that the terminology describing these courts varied across treatises, and that "cocets" may appear alongside or in place of more familiar terms like "admiralty court" or "district court sitting in admiralty." The Bouvier entry draws on Parsons's Maritime Law (vol. 2, p. 508), which remains a useful primary reference for the historical framework, though it must be read against subsequent statutory and constitutional developments that reshaped federal admiralty jurisdiction.
Because the term is rare and primarily sourced through Bouvier and the Parsons treatise, corpus searches using "cocets" alone will return limited results. Researchers should pair it with admiralty jurisdiction, maritime court, and district court admiralty terms to capture the full relevant literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines cocets as a tribunal exercising jurisdiction over all maritime contracts, torts, injuries, or offenses, citing Parsons's Maritime Law (2 Pars. Mar. Law 508). Bouvier identifies the United States District Court as the court of original admiralty jurisdiction in the United States and notes the historical appellate path from district to circuit to Supreme Court, describing the resolution of what he characterizes as a "somewhat protracted contest" over the scope and structure of that jurisdiction.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus include an independent entry for "cocets." The term does not appear in Black's early editions as a standalone entry, and it is absent from standard modern maritime law references. Its presence in Bouvier reflects the encyclopedic character of that dictionary, which frequently preserved terminology from treatise literature that did not achieve broader circulation in judicial or statutory usage.
The Bouvier entry is useful primarily as a pointer to the Parsons treatise and as confirmation that "cocets" was understood, at least in mid-nineteenth-century American legal writing, as a functional synonym for the admiralty jurisdiction of the federal district courts — not as a term of art with independent doctrinal significance.
Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, admiralty and maritime jurisdiction is exclusively federal, vested in the district courts by Article III of the Constitution and implementing statute. State courts may hear certain maritime matters under the "saving to suitors" clause, but the admiralty tribunal function described by "cocets" is a federal concept. The term has no meaningful application in state court practice.