Definition
A Latin term from Roman and early English law meaning to let for hire — to deliver or bail a thing to another person in exchange for a certain reward or compensation. The term encompasses both the leasing of property (land, houses, or other things) and the delivery of goods or chattels for use under a contractual arrangement involving payment. It is the operative verb underlying the Roman law contract of locatio conductio, the broad category of hire agreements from which much of common law and civil law lease and bailment doctrine descends.
Common Language
Locare is pure legal Latin with no modern common English counterpart. It does not appear in Wiktionary or Webster's 1913 as an English word. Its nearest functional equivalents in plain English are "to lease," "to rent out," or "to let." Researchers encountering the term in historical sources should resist equating it too narrowly with any single modern concept: depending on context, it may refer to what modern law calls a lease, a bailment for hire, a contract for services, or a contract for work.
Common Confusion
Locare is frequently encountered without clear indication of which species of the broader locatio conductio framework is meant. Roman law recognized three distinct forms: locatio rei (hiring of a thing), locatio operarum (hiring of labor or services), and locatio operis faciendi (hiring for the completion of a specific work). Historical English sources, including Bracton and Fleta, sometimes use locare without distinguishing among these forms. A researcher who reads locare as equivalent to a modern lease of real property may misread sources that use the term to describe what would now be characterized as a contract for work or a bailment for reward.
Why It Matters in Research
Locare appears almost exclusively in historical and comparative legal sources. Researchers will encounter it in medieval English legal texts — particularly Bracton and Fleta — and in annotations drawing on Justinian's Digest. Its presence signals a context rooted in civilian or civil-law-influenced analysis, and it may appear in early common law discussions of lease and bailment before those concepts fully diverged.
Three traps are worth flagging. First, the term's breadth: because locare covers the full range of locatio conductio relationships, a passage using locare may be addressing property hire, labor hire, or work-for-hire, and the surrounding context is essential for correct classification. Second, Black's 2nd edition entry for locare appears in the corpus amid unrelated French civil code material (the obligation sans cause passage), which is an artifact of typesetting in the historical source — researchers should not treat that surrounding text as analytically connected to locare. Third, when tracing the doctrinal lineage of modern lease or bailment arguments into Roman sources, locare functions as the bridge term and will appear in any serious comparative treatment.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: to let for hire; to deliver or bail a thing for a certain reward or compensation. Burrill provides the richest citation support, pointing to Justinian's Digest (19.2.3–4 et seq.), Bracton (fol. 62), and Fleta (lib. 2, c. 59, § 1), grounding the term firmly in both civilian and early English authority. Black's 1st and 2nd editions are consistent with Burrill but less detailed, essentially reproducing the Bracton reference. None of the three dictionaries distinguish among the subtypes of locatio conductio, which is a meaningful omission for researchers working on anything beyond the most basic definitional question. The historical dictionaries treat locare as a term of art requiring no further unpacking — modern researchers should treat that confidence as a prompt to consult the Digest directly when precision matters.
Jurisdictional Note
Locare as a term of art is not in active use in any modern common law jurisdiction. It remains relevant to Louisiana and Quebec legal research (and to comparative civil law work generally) because the civilian tradition from which it derives continues to shape those systems' lease and hire doctrine. In purely common law jurisdictions, its relevance is historical and analytical only.