Definition
Laration is an archaic term of pleading that identifies a structural component of the common law declaration. Specifically, it denotes the portion of a declaration that falls after the venue and before the circumstantial narrative of the cause of action. In its historical form, the laration served as a bridge section, identifying the parties by name and capacity (including any representative or official character in which they appeared), noting how the defendant had been brought before the court, and briefly characterizing the form of action being pursued.
The term belongs entirely to the technical vocabulary of common law pleading and has no operative role in modern civil procedure.
Common Confusion
Laration should not be confused with the declaration as a whole. The declaration was the plaintiff's complete initial pleading at common law; the laration was only one internal segment of it. Researchers encountering references to the laration in historical pleading manuals should understand it as a formal transitional passage within a larger document, not as a standalone filing or a synonym for the declaration itself.
Why It Matters in Research
Laration is primarily useful as an orientation term when reading pre-reform pleading documents or treatises on common law practice. Researchers working in English or early American court records prior to the nineteenth-century procedural reforms — and particularly before the adoption of code pleading following the New York Field Code of 1848 and its American successors — may encounter declarations structured according to these formal internal divisions. Knowing that the laration occupied a specific, bounded position within the declaration helps in parsing what can otherwise appear to be formulaic boilerplate obscuring the substantive legal claim.
The term rarely appears in modern legal scholarship or litigation. Its primary research value is archival and historical: understanding it clarifies the anatomy of common law pleading for those working with manuscript court records, printed plea rolls, or early American practice treatises. Researchers should be aware that Bouvier's definition reflects a transitional period in which these formal divisions were already being simplified; sources from earlier centuries may treat the components of the declaration with even greater internal formality and different terminology.
Cross-corpus researchers should note that the laration's function — identifying parties, capacity, and process — maps roughly onto what modern civil procedure distributes across the caption, the allegations concerning jurisdiction and parties, and the statement of the claim. No single modern analog preserves the laration as a named unit.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical source providing a definition of this term within the present corpus. Bouvier treats the laration as a recognizable, if declining, feature of formal pleading practice, noting that in modern practice (as of Bouvier's period) the rigid internal structure of the declaration had been considerably loosened. The phrase "in modern practice" in Bouvier signals that even within nineteenth-century American legal culture the term was receding toward historical description rather than active use.
No competing or contradicting definition is available from the present source set. Researchers seeking fuller treatment should consult common law pleading treatises — Chitty on Pleading and Stephen's Principles of Pleading are the standard reference points — which address the internal structure of the declaration in detail, though they may not consistently use the label "laration" as a discrete term of art.
Jurisdictional Note
The laration as a formal pleading concept is a product of English common law procedure and its American colonial and early republican successors. It ceased to have operative significance in American jurisdictions adopting code pleading during the mid-to-late nineteenth century and has no role in federal practice under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938). English procedural reform under the Judicature Acts similarly rendered the term obsolete.