Definition
Conjoints are persons married to each other; spouses considered as a unit or pair. The term is used in legal contexts to describe the two parties to a marriage in relation to one another, particularly when analyzing questions of domicile, conflict of laws, or marital rights that depend on the relationship between the spouses as co-parties rather than as individuals.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Conjoints" is not a standard modern English word. "Conjoint" as an adjective means joined together, united, or combined; as a noun, it may refer to persons or things united in a common enterprise or condition.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Conjoint" — united; connected; associated. The noun form is not prominently treated.
Editorial note: The legal use of "conjoints" as a specific noun denoting married spouses is narrower and more technical than the general adjectival sense of "joined together." A researcher encountering the word in historical legal texts should not read it as a generic term for any associated parties — it carries the specific meaning of married persons in relation to each other.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in conflict of laws contexts — specifically in older treatises analyzing questions of where married persons are domiciled, which jurisdiction's law governs marital property, and how courts determine the rights of spouses when the parties have connections to multiple legal systems. Story's Conflict of Laws (§ 71), the source cited by every historical dictionary entry, is the primary locus. Researchers working with 19th-century American and Anglo-American private international law materials will encounter "conjoints" as a term of art borrowed from civil law and French legal tradition, where it remained more common than in English common law sources.
The word is essentially absent from modern American legal writing. If you encounter it in a contemporary document, it is almost certainly a translation from French (where "conjoints" remains standard for spouses in family law and notarial documents) or a quotation from an older source. Researchers working with Louisiana materials, Quebec law, or any civil-law-influenced jurisdiction should be alert to this word appearing in source documents and translations.
One practical trap: Rapalje & Lawrence's entry runs "conjoints" directly into a separate entry for "conjudex" without a clear break, reflecting the compressed format of that dictionary. Researchers consulting that source should not conflate the two terms or assume the passage about Congress that follows is part of the definition of conjoints — it is an artifact of the dictionary's layout.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries give identical or nearly identical definitions: "Persons married to each other," uniformly citing Story's Conflict of Laws § 71. Bouvier adds a secondary citation to Wolffius, Droit de la Nature § 858, gesturing toward the civil law and natural law tradition from which the term was drawn. The consistency across sources suggests this was a settled, if narrow, term of art — not contested or evolving, but also not widely used. The historical dictionaries do not address its French origins explicitly, nor do they flag the jurisdictional specificity of its use in conflict of laws analysis rather than domestic family law. The absence of any common law case citations in any of the four entries reinforces that this was primarily a treatise term, not one that generated substantial judicial usage in American courts.
Jurisdictional Note
"Conjoints" remains a living term in French-language legal systems, including Quebec and France, where it is standard vocabulary for married spouses in family law documents. In Louisiana, with its civil law heritage, researchers may encounter the term in older statutes, notarial acts, and treatises. In all other American jurisdictions, the term is effectively archaic and confined to historical sources.