Definition
"Eration" does not appear as a standalone legal term in the historical or modern legal lexicon. The source material provided under this heading is fragmentary text drawn from unrelated entries — specifically, a partial definition of a consideration doctrine (referencing moral obligation and "valuable consideration in the second degree") and material on the Norman-French term "mesne." Neither passage defines or uses "eration" as a term of art.
This entry cannot be completed as a substantive legal definition because no reliable source — historical or modern — establishes "eration" as a recognized legal term. The apparent entry appears to be the result of a truncation or indexing error in the source corpus, likely capturing the tail end of a longer term (such as CON-SIDE-RATION or REMUNER-ATION) rather than a freestanding word.
Common Confusion
"Eration" may be confused with the following genuine legal terms whose truncated or corrupted forms it could represent:
CONSIDERATION — the foundational contract law doctrine governing what makes a promise legally enforceable. The fragment in the source material (moral obligation, valuable consideration in the second degree) is characteristic of 19th-century consideration doctrine.
REMUNERATION — payment or compensation for services, used in employment, contract, and tax law contexts.
MODERATION — used in older ecclesiastical and administrative law contexts.
Researchers should identify the surrounding text and page context in the original source to determine which term was intended.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "eration" as an apparent headword in a digitized or indexed version of a historical legal dictionary should treat it as an artifact of OCR error, page-break truncation, or index corruption rather than a genuine legal term. Historical law dictionaries — including Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier's — were frequently digitized from imperfect print sources, and partial words at page or column breaks are a known data-quality hazard in legal corpus research.
If the fragment referencing "moral obligation" and "valuable consideration in the second degree" is the relevant research thread, the correct headword is almost certainly CONSIDERATION, and specifically the historical doctrine distinguishing good consideration (founded on moral obligation) from valuable consideration (supported by material benefit or detriment). The fragment "in the second degree" is consistent with older treatise language classifying consideration types hierarchically.
If the adjacent "mesne" material is the relevant thread, the correct headword is MESNE, a Norman-French term meaning middle or intervening, used in compounds such as mesne lord, mesne profits, and mesne process.
Historical Dictionary Support
Neither Rapalje & Lawrence nor Bouvier's Law Dictionary contains a substantive entry for "eration" as an independent legal term. The text attributed to this headword in the source material is plainly fragment text from other entries. Bouvier's entries reproduced in the source block — PRENDER and PRENOMEN — bear no relationship to any term resembling "eration" and appear to have been pulled from surrounding pages rather than a genuine "eration" headword.
No synthesis across historical sources is possible for a term that does not exist in those sources as defined. Fabricating a definition would be inconsistent with sound legal research practice and is not done here.