Definition
In French and civil law, the arrangement or marshaling of the creditors of an estate in the order in which they are entitled to be paid under applicable law. The term refers both to the process of ranking creditors and to the resulting order itself — that is, "collocation" may describe the act of prioritizing claims against an estate or the schedule of priority that emerges from that process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds; in linguistics, a statistically significant co-occurrence of particular words that functions as an established or idiomatic expression.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of placing; the state of being placed with something else; disposition in place; arrangement." Exemplified in literary and rhetorical contexts: "The choice and collocation of words."
The legal meaning is a specific technical application of the general sense of "arrangement" or "ordering," but the legal term operates within a narrow domain — creditor priority in estate administration — that has no intuitive connection to the word's modern linguistic meaning. A researcher encountering "collocation" in a legal text and approaching it with a linguistics or general vocabulary background will almost certainly misread it.
Common Confusion
Collocation is occasionally confused with COLLOQUIUM, a pleading term. Rapalje & Lawrence runs the two entries in sequence without a firm break, creating a layout that can mislead a researcher skimming that source. The terms are entirely unrelated: colloquium concerns the identification of the plaintiff in a defamation declaration; collocation concerns creditor ordering in estate proceedings. Researchers in historical legal dictionaries should confirm which term is actually under discussion before extracting a definition.
Why It Matters in Research
Collocation is a term of French civil law that entered American legal literature primarily through Louisiana jurisprudence and occasional federal court treatment of mixed civil-common law questions. The citation appearing in Bouvier and Rapalje — "2 Low. C. 9, 139" — refers to Lowell's decisions in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, reflecting the term's occasional appearance in federal insolvency and admiralty contexts as well as Louisiana-origin disputes.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the term is jurisdictionally narrow. Outside Louisiana and historical civilian contexts, "collocation" as a legal term of art is largely absent from American common law sources. A researcher using full-text search across a mixed corpus will retrieve far more linguistic and general usage hits than legal ones. Context filtering is essential.
Second, the dual meaning noted by Bouvier — collocation as both the act of arranging creditors and the resulting priority schedule — matters when reading older Louisiana cases and treatises. A court discussing "the collocation" may be referring to a document or order, not an ongoing process.
Third, modern estate and insolvency law in common law jurisdictions handles creditor priority through entirely different terminology: marshaling of assets, priority of claims, order of distribution. A researcher tracing the conceptual lineage of creditor priority rules from civil law sources into American law needs to recognize collocation as the civilian antecedent term and not expect it to appear in modern statutory or case law outside Louisiana.
Fourth, the word's ordinary English meaning — arrangement or ordering of words — is now dominated by its linguistic sense. Any corpus search that does not filter for legal context will produce overwhelming noise.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five source dictionaries converge almost exactly. Black's (both editions), Bouvier, and Burrill reproduce the same core definition with only minor variation in phrasing, all citing Merlin's Répertoire de Jurisprudence as authority. This uniformity signals that the term entered American legal lexicography as a received civilian concept rather than through indigenous doctrinal development — the dictionaries are transmitting French law, not reporting American usage.
Bouvier adds the most substantive detail by clarifying that the term covers both the act and the resulting order, a distinction the other sources fold into a single sentence without flagging. Rapalje & Lawrence provides the same substance but presents it in compressed form and — notably — runs immediately into the entry for Colloquium without strong visual separation, creating the confusion risk identified above.
None of the historical dictionaries address the term's procedural mechanics: how a collocation was contested, what court supervised it, or how it interacted with privilege and hypothec rules. Researchers needing that level of detail must go beyond the dictionaries to civilian treatises and Louisiana appellate decisions.
Jurisdictional Note
Collocation as a legal term of art is functionally confined to Louisiana and historical sources drawing on French civil law. In other American jurisdictions, the concept exists under different terminology within probate, insolvency, and creditor priority frameworks. Researchers working in Louisiana law should consult Louisiana Civil Code provisions on privileges and the order of payment of debts, where the underlying doctrine survives even if the precise term has receded.