Definition
In Spanish and civil law, licitacion is the sale of jointly held property — owned by co-heirs or co-proprietors — at public auction, where the property cannot be equitably or practically divided in kind among the owners. Rather than forcing a physical partition that would diminish the property's value or usefulness, the co-owners submit the property to competitive bidding, with proceeds distributed according to each party's respective share.
The term originates in Spanish legal tradition and surfaces primarily in jurisdictions that inherited civilian legal frameworks, particularly Louisiana and the former Spanish territories of the American Southwest. It is the functional equivalent of a partition sale in common law systems — the remedy when physical division of jointly held property is impracticable or would cause material detriment to the whole.
Common Confusion
Licitacion is closely related to, but distinct from, ordinary partition. Partition in kind divides the property itself among co-owners. Licitacion applies specifically when partition in kind is not feasible — the property is sold as a unit and the owners share the proceeds. Researchers should not treat the two as interchangeable: a licitacion is triggered by the impracticability of physical division, making it a specific subspecies of the broader partition remedy. Bouvier's cross-reference to "CANT" signals this connection; cant was the older term for the same auction mechanism in some civil law traditions.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in sources tied to civil law jurisdictions — primarily Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, California, and Florida — and in materials predating those states' full absorption of common law property doctrine. Researchers working in Louisiana succession and property law will encounter licitacion most often in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cases and notarial records, where it appears as a standard procedural remedy in succession proceedings involving indivisible estate assets.
The chief research trap is terminology drift. As common law vocabulary displaced civilian terms across the Southwest and in portions of Louisiana practice, licitacion was increasingly replaced in legal documents by "partition sale" or simply "public sale." A researcher scanning for one term may miss records using the other, depending on the era and jurisdiction of the document.
The Bouvier reference to CANT is a useful corpus connection: researchers who find licitacion in one source should check adjacent entries for cant and licitation (an anglicized variant spelling) to capture the full documentary record.
In Louisiana specifically, the Civil Code's partition provisions governed licitacion proceedings, and the procedural rules for court-ordered auction sales are embedded in that code's succession and co-ownership chapters rather than in common law partition statutes. Researchers approaching this term through common law property research frameworks risk missing the civilian procedural scaffolding that governs how the sale was conducted and how proceeds were allocated.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Bouvier's are in substantive agreement: licitacion is the public auction sale of jointly held property that is not susceptible of division in kind. The definitions are nearly identical across all three sources, reflecting stable civilian doctrine rather than a contested or evolving concept.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the procedural mechanism — how the auction was initiated, who could demand it, what court had jurisdiction, and how the proceeds were distributed. Those details lived in the applicable civil codes and local court practice, not in the dictionary entry itself. Researchers relying solely on these definitions will have the concept but will need to turn to Louisiana Civil Code commentaries and period treatises on Spanish and French property law for procedural guidance.
Bouvier's cross-reference to CANT is the most useful navigational signal in the historical sources. It confirms that the term was understood as part of a family of related auction-and-partition concepts, and that cant was its functional counterpart in some usage. Neither Black's edition expands on this connection.
Jurisdictional Note
Licitacion as a term of art is confined to civil law jurisdictions, principally Louisiana. In common law states, the equivalent remedy — a court-ordered sale of indivisible jointly held property — is governed by partition statutes and equity practice, and the term licitacion will not appear in those sources. Researchers working across jurisdictional lines should map licitacion to "partition sale by licitation" in Louisiana sources and to "forced sale in lieu of partition" in common law equivalents.