Definition
A French legal and commercial term meaning expenses, charges, or costs. The term appears in American and Canadian legal sources primarily in two contexts:
1. General costs of legal proceedings. Frais refers to the expenses and charges associated with litigation or legal action. The phrase frais d'un procès means the costs of a suit.
2. Pre-shipment commercial expenses. In French commercial and customs law, frais jusqu'à bord (literally, expenses to the board or vessel) denotes the costs incurred in preparing and delivering goods to a ship for export — including packing, cartage, and commissions paid to a shipping merchant — but not including the goods' dutiable value. These charges were treated as distinct from the goods themselves for customs valuation purposes.
A third recognized phrase, frais de justice, appears in French and Canadian law to describe costs incurred incidentally in the course of an action, as distinguished from the principal subject matter of the suit.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In modern French, frais means costs, expenses, or charges. It is a common, everyday word with no specialized connotation in ordinary French speech.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a separate entry for frais, reflecting the word's status in American English as a borrowed legal and commercial term rather than naturalized vocabulary.
Editorial note: The gap here is not between legal and common meaning but between French everyday usage and the specific technical weight the term carries in American customs and admiralty law. A researcher encountering frais in an English-language legal document should not read it as merely casual reference to expenses — it signals either a litigation-cost provision or, more commonly, a precise customs valuation question about pre-boarding charges.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Frais d'un procès — costs of a suit; the expenses of litigation generally.
Frais de justice — incidental costs of an action in French and Canadian legal proceedings; costs arising from the conduct of the suit rather than its subject matter.
Frais jusqu'à bord — pre-shipment expenses up to and including delivery on board a vessel; a customs and commercial law term used to determine which charges are dutiable on imported goods.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter frais most often in one of three documentary contexts: (1) nineteenth-century admiralty and customs litigation, where the question was whether frais jusqu'à bord charges were dutiable as part of the value of imported goods; (2) French Canadian legal materials and Louisiana civil law sources, where frais de justice appears as a term of art in cost-allocation provisions; and (3) older commercial invoices and trade documents, where the phrase frais jusqu'à bord was used to specify the seller's responsibility and the basis for customs valuation.
The customs valuation question — whether pre-boarding expenses were included in the dutiable value of goods — was a live issue in late nineteenth-century American federal courts. Anderson's Dictionary specifically notes that frais jusqu'à bord charges, including cartage and commissions paid to the shipping merchant, were treated as not dutiable, which had direct financial consequences for importers.
Researchers working in Louisiana law or Canadian law should be alert to the fact that frais de justice retains active meaning in those jurisdictions' civil law cost regimes, where it may carry more precise procedural weight than a simple English translation would suggest. Do not treat frais as interchangeable with the common law concept of costs without checking the applicable civil law framework.
Historical sources will not always distinguish cleanly among the three subtypes. Black's first edition collapses the term to a brief gloss; the second edition expands to include frais de justice and frais jusqu'à bord, making the second edition the more useful starting point for research into the subtypes.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries show a clear progression of detail. Black's first edition offers only the bare gloss — expenses, charges, costs — and the litigation phrase frais d'un procès. This is minimally useful for research beyond confirming that the term means costs in a French-origin legal document.
Black's second edition substantially expands the entry, adding both frais de justice (with a note on French and Canadian law) and frais jusqu'à bord (with a note on French commercial law and a reference to actual litigation). Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the most commercially specific treatment, explaining the practical customs consequence — that frais jusqu'à bord charges are not dutiable — and cross-referencing the free on board concept.
The dictionaries agree on the core meaning and on the non-dutiable character of frais jusqu'à bord charges. What they do not supply is any treatment of how frais de justice functions within civil law cost allocation as a living procedural concept. Researchers working in Quebec or Louisiana law should treat the historical dictionary entries as orientation only and consult civil law secondary sources for operative meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
In Louisiana and Quebec, frais de justice retains substantive procedural meaning within civil law cost regimes and should not be assimilated to the common law concept of taxable costs without checking local authority. In federal customs and admiralty contexts, frais jusqu'à bord was a term of art with specific valuation consequences under nineteenth-century import law; its relevance to modern customs practice is primarily historical.