Definition
Agreements entered into by parties in consequence of a court order. A judicial convention arises when a court's directive — rather than the independent will of the parties — compels or occasions the formation of an agreement. The agreement is not purely voluntary; it exists because a judicial proceeding required it.
The classic illustration is a bond executed upon the issuance of a writ of sequestration: the court orders the writ, and the party seeking it must enter into a bond as a condition of receiving it. That bond is a judicial convention. The term captures the category of legally operative agreements whose origin lies in judicial process rather than in private bargain.
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Common Confusion
Judicial conventions are easily confused with ordinary contracts or stipulations. The distinction is not the form of the agreement but its occasion: a judicial convention flows from a court order or the requirements of a judicial proceeding, while a contract or stipulation arises from the parties' own initiative. Similarly, "convention" in this context should not be confused with its constitutional sense — an assembly convened to propose or ratify law — nor with its diplomatic sense of a treaty or international agreement. Those uses of "convention" share the idea of a formal agreement but operate in entirely different legal registers.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term is encountered primarily in older Louisiana and civil-law-influenced American sources. Because Louisiana law was shaped by the French civil law tradition, in which "convention" is the standard civil-law term for any legally binding agreement (roughly equivalent to "contract" in common-law usage), the phrase "judicial convention" appears more frequently in Louisiana jurisprudence and in treatises discussing civil-law procedure than in the common-law reporters and texts of other American states.
Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century Louisiana materials — including the Martineau reports cited by Black's and Bouvier's (6 Mart. La. N.S. 494) — will encounter this term in procedural contexts: bonds for costs, bonds on sequestration, bonds for release of attachment, and similar instruments required by the court as a condition of granting a procedural remedy.
In common-law jurisdictions, the same concept tends to appear under different labels: "court-ordered bond," "recognizance," "undertaking," or simply a "bond" required as a condition of a judicial remedy. Researchers searching common-law sources for the concept of a judicial convention should use those alternative terms rather than expecting the phrase to appear.
The term is largely absent from modern legal writing. A researcher who encounters it in a historical source should not assume it describes an agreement between courts, a judicial rule of practice, or a judicial conference — all of which modern readers might associate with the word "convention" in other contexts.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier's are in complete agreement on this term: all three define judicial conventions as agreements entered into in pursuance or consequence of a court order, and all use the sequestration bond as the illustrative example. Black's and Bouvier's cite the same Louisiana authority (6 Mart. La. N.S. 494), confirming the term's civil-law pedigree.
None of the three dictionaries develop the term beyond the basic definition and illustration. There is no discussion of enforceability, no treatment of how such agreements interact with contract doctrine, and no analysis of what happens when a party breaches a judicial convention. The brevity reflects the term's relatively narrow and procedural character: it names a category rather than a doctrine. Researchers should not expect historical dictionaries to provide more analytical depth than the sources themselves contain.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is most at home in Louisiana and other jurisdictions with civil-law roots. In common-law states, the underlying concept exists but travels under different names (recognizance, undertaking, surety bond required by court order). Researchers treating this term as interchangeable with "convention" in its civil-law sense — meaning any contract or binding agreement — will find the field much broader than the specific procedural category the term actually describes.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia: Mortgages — Foreclosure — Judicial Foreclosure (property_61) (for context on court-ordered procedural instruments in property proceedings).
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