Definition
COURSES is the plural of "course" and operates in law primarily as a component of compound terms rather than as a standalone legal concept. Its legal significance arises almost entirely from three related doctrines in contracts and commercial law—course of dealing, course of performance, and course of conduct—plus one well-established doctrine in property law governing the description of land boundaries.
1. Courses (property/surveying): In real property descriptions, "courses and distances" refers to the directional bearings and linear measurements used to describe the boundaries of a parcel of land. A "course" in this sense is a line of direction, typically expressed as a compass bearing (e.g., "North 45 degrees East"). Together, courses and distances form the foundational method of metes-and-bounds land description. When conflicts arise among boundary description elements, courts apply a hierarchy in which natural monuments generally prevail over artificial monuments, which prevail over courses and distances.
2. Course of dealing: A sequence of previous conduct between parties to a contract that establishes a common basis for interpreting their current agreement. Under the Uniform Commercial Code and general contract law, course of dealing can be used to explain or supplement the express terms of a written agreement.
3. Course of performance: Conduct that occurs under a particular contract after formation and during performance, which may be used to interpret the meaning of that contract's terms or to establish a waiver of conditions.
4. Course of conduct: A broader behavioral pattern used in various legal contexts, including criminal law (harassment statutes), family law, and evidence, to establish intent, habit, or motive through repeated actions.
5. Ordinary course (of business): In commercial and secured transactions law, the phrase "ordinary course of business" or "buyers in the ordinary course" defines a class of purchasers who take goods free of prior security interests under UCC Article 9.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "course" — classes, routes, sequences, meals, paths of action, or sporting terrains.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Course" encompassed a range of meanings including a line of direction, a series of actions, a channel of water, and a prescribed curriculum.
The common meanings of "course" — a route taken, a class studied, a meal served — have no particular legal weight. Legal significance attaches almost exclusively to compound uses: "course of dealing," "course of performance," "courses and distances," and "ordinary course." A researcher encountering the bare plural "courses" in a legal document should immediately ask which compound usage the context implies.
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Common Confusion
Course of dealing and course of performance are frequently conflated. The distinction is temporal: course of dealing looks backward to prior contracts between the parties; course of performance looks at how the parties have behaved under the very contract in dispute. Both are distinct from usage of trade, which derives not from the parties' own history but from industry-wide custom. All three may be used interpretively under the UCC, but they carry different weight and serve different evidentiary functions.
"Courses and distances" in surveying is an entirely separate context with no relationship to the UCC doctrines. Researchers working in both property and commercial law should not allow familiarity with one usage to bleed into the other.
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Why It Matters in Research
The word "courses" rarely appears alone in legal sources — it is almost always a fragment of a compound doctrine or a surveying term. This creates real indexing traps. Historical digests and older treatises may not collect "course of dealing," "course of performance," and "courses and distances" under a single head. Researchers should search for each compound term individually.
In historical sources predating the UCC, the doctrines now codified as course of dealing and course of performance existed under different names and frameworks — "practical construction," "mutual interpretation," and "acts of the parties." Searching older materials for modern UCC terminology will miss substantial relevant authority.
The property law usage — "courses and distances" — appears heavily in colonial land records, early American deed books, and title chains. In those contexts, "courses" does not invoke contract interpretation at all. Researchers working with early American land grants or metes-and-bounds descriptions will encounter the surveying sense exclusively.
Bouvier's routing of this entry to "WATERS" (without further elaboration) reflects the historical practice of treating "courses" of rivers and streams as a boundary-description problem. That context — watercourse boundaries — sits at the intersection of property, surveying, and riparian law, and is distinct from both the UCC doctrines and conventional metes-and-bounds description.
The encyclopedia entries in the Law Mind corpus covering course of dealing, course of performance, and buyers in the ordinary course represent the richest sources for the commercial law dimensions of this term. Property researchers should consult encyclopedia entries on metes-and-bounds description and boundary disputes.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier treat "courses" only incidentally. Bouvier routes the entry to "WATERS" without substantive definition, a characteristic handling that reflects the nineteenth-century tendency to treat courses of water as part of riparian and boundary law rather than as a standalone concept. The Rapalje & Lawrence fragment, concerned with county court jurisdiction, does not address "courses" as a legal term of art at all — the word appears there in a non-technical sense.
Neither source anticipates the modern UCC framework. The doctrines of course of dealing and course of performance, as formally codified, post-date both dictionaries. Researchers should treat their silence as a gap, not a negation, and consult twentieth-century commercial law treatises and the UCC Official Comments for authoritative treatment of those doctrines.
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Jurisdictional Note
The UCC doctrines (course of dealing, course of performance, ordinary course) apply in all U.S. jurisdictions that have adopted the UCC, which includes all fifty states in substantially uniform form, though judicial interpretation varies. The surveying usage of "courses and distances" is universal in metes-and-bounds jurisdictions (primarily the eastern United States and the South) but less prominent in states that use the Public Land Survey System.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia:
— Interpretation: Course of Dealing, Course of Performance, and Usage of Trade (contracts_42)
— Performance: Waiver of Conditions and Course of Performance (contracts_58)
— Secured Transactions: Buyers in the Ordinary Course of Business (contracts_142)
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