Definition
Frais de justice is a French legal term meaning "costs of justice" or "costs of court" — the incidental expenses arising out of litigation or legal proceedings. In French and Canadian legal systems, the term refers broadly to costs incurred in connection with an action: court fees, procedural charges, and similar expenses that attend the conduct of a lawsuit rather than the substantive merits of the claim. The phrase encompasses what common-law systems would recognize as court costs or taxable costs of suit.
A closely related phrase, frais d'un procès, carries the same practical meaning — costs of a suit — and the two expressions are used interchangeably in French-language legal sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in French and Quebec civil law sources, and in early American federal cases involving French commercial law or Louisiana-related disputes. Researchers working in pre-Confederation Canadian law, Louisiana civil law materials, or maritime and commercial records with French-language origins will encounter it as a term of art rather than a descriptive phrase.
The key research trap is treating frais de justice as equivalent to the common-law concept of "costs" without accounting for the civil law context. In civil law systems, the allocation and scope of litigation costs operate under different rules than the common-law costs regime. A finding of frais de justice in a Quebec or Louisiana source does not map cleanly onto an Anglo-American costs award without examining the procedural framework in which the term was used.
Researchers should also be alert to the companion term frais jusqu'à bord, which appears in French commercial and maritime law to denote expenses incurred up to the point of shipment aboard a vessel — including packing, porterage, cartage, and commissions. Despite the shared root frais (expenses), frais jusqu'à bord is a distinct commercial concept with no procedural dimension. Conflating the two in maritime or trade documents is a common source of interpretive error.
In Law Mind corpus materials, frais de justice is most likely to surface in Quebec case reports, Louisiana civil law compilations, French maritime law treatises, and early federal admiralty decisions referencing French commercial practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary treats the term concisely: costs incurred incidentally to the action, in French and Canadian law. Bouvier's Law Dictionary is somewhat more expansive, pairing the procedural definition with the companion phrase frais d'un procès (costs of a suit) and separately treating frais jusqu'à bord as a commercial law term. Bouvier references Troplong and Lower Canada Reports for authority, situating the term squarely in civilian legal tradition.
Both dictionaries agree on the core meaning. Neither source attempts a thorough treatment of how frais de justice functions within the broader costs regime of civil law procedure — the rules governing which costs are recoverable, how they are taxed, and by whom. Researchers requiring that level of analysis must go beyond the dictionary shelf to Quebec procedural codes or French civil procedure treatises of the relevant period.
Neither source flags the potential for confusion with frais jusqu'à bord, despite Bouvier treating both terms in the same entry. That adjacency in the text has led some researchers to blur the distinction between the two phrases.
Jurisdictional Note
Frais de justice is operative primarily in Quebec and Louisiana, the two North American jurisdictions with deep roots in French civil law. In Quebec, costs in civil proceedings are now governed by the Code of Civil Procedure; the French phrase retains currency in Quebec courts and legal literature. In Louisiana, which operates a mixed legal system, the term may appear in older sources but modern practice uses English-language costs terminology.