Definition
To locate, in legal usage, means to ascertain, fix, or designate the place or position of something — either by identifying where something already described belongs in physical space, or by assigning a definite place to something not yet established.
Two principal legal senses prevail:
1. To identify the actual physical position of a described thing. In land law, this is the core meaning: to take the calls, distances, and monuments in a deed or survey and match them to actual ground. To locate a deed is to determine where on the earth's surface the described land lies.
2. To fix, establish, or lay out the position of something to be created. A legislature or commission locates a road, a canal, or a public building by designating the route or site it will occupy. The act of locating here is prescriptive and often carries legal consequence, such as vesting rights or triggering condemnation authority.
A third, narrower sense appears in American public land law: to locate a land warrant or mining claim is to apply a floating grant to a specific tract, thereby converting an unattached entitlement into a definite parcel.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To place something in a particular spot; to find out where something is; to settle or take up residence.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To place; to set in a particular spot or position; to designate the site or limits of something.
The ordinary meanings track the legal meanings more closely here than with many legal terms, but the gap matters in a research context. In ordinary usage, to locate something often means to find it — to discover a thing whose position was unknown. In legal usage, especially in deed and survey law, to locate is a term of art meaning to match a written description to the ground, a task that may involve construction, interpretation, and expert testimony, not merely discovery. The public lands sense — locating a warrant — has no common counterpart at all and is strictly technical.
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Common Confusion
LOCATE vs. SURVEY: These terms appear together and are sometimes treated as synonymous in older sources, but they are distinct. To locate is to fix or identify the position; to survey is to measure and map it. A warrant-holder might first locate (select the tract) and then survey (have it measured and returned). Rapalje & Lawrence note that a power to locate and survey gives power to do both steps, implying they are separable acts. In deed interpretation, locating the calls is an interpretive exercise; surveying is a field operation.
LOCATE vs. ESTABLISH: In road and public works law, to locate a road means to determine its route by official act; to establish it typically means to complete the legal process by which it becomes a public way. Some jurisdictions use the terms interchangeably; others treat location as a preliminary step and establishment as the final one. Historical sources do not always distinguish them carefully.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term appears in at least three distinct legal contexts, and conflating them produces research errors.
In deed and title litigation, locate is the verb of boundary resolution. When a deed's description is ambiguous or its calls do not close, courts must locate the land — determine what the grantor intended and where it lies. Research in this area will encounter the related doctrines of calls and their priority (natural monuments, artificial monuments, course, distance, quantity) and the parol evidence rules governing extrinsic proof of location.
In public land law, locate is a term of art tied to the federal land warrant and mining claim systems. To locate a warrant was the act by which a grantee affixed a floating right to a specific tract; improper location could defeat title. This usage saturates 19th-century American land case law and the historical dictionaries, particularly Burrill and Bouvier, which reflect that era. Researchers in modern land law should recognize this as largely historical usage, though mining claim location survives in active federal law.
In public works and municipal law, locate appears in enabling acts and charters authorizing entities to locate roads, railways, canals, and public buildings. The legal significance of a formal location act — when it occurs, what it authorizes, and whether it is final — varies considerably by statute and jurisdiction.
Researchers using historical sources should be alert to the dominance of the land warrant context in pre-20th-century dictionaries. The more common modern usage — locating a call in a deed — is present in all sources but is somewhat overshadowed in Burrill and Bouvier by the warrant system discussion.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is unusual in flagging a non-standard usage: locate treated as synonymous with erect or put up in certain New York and Illinois cases. This is a minority usage, appears to be jurisdiction-specific, and should not be assumed to carry over.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in substantial agreement on the core meaning. All define locate as fixing or designating the place of something, and all ground the definition in the Latin locus. Burrill is the most analytical, distinguishing between identifying the place of an already-described thing and marking out the boundaries of land according to a prior description. Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence track closely and add the road and public works sense explicitly.
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) offer parallel definitions, with the 1st edition adding a stray entry for "depositee" that appears to be a printing artifact or editorial error unrelated to locate. Both Black's editions give the deed-call and road examples as the paradigm cases.
Anderson's is sparer, referencing the survey call meaning and cross-referencing locus, which reflects that dictionary's more compressed style.
None of the historical sources address the modern forensic or investigative sense of locate — finding a person, asset, or document — which has become prominent in litigation practice (skip tracing, asset searches, service of process). This is a genuine gap: the historical dictionaries are focused on land and give no purchase for researchers encountering locate in procedural or enforcement contexts.
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Jurisdictional Note
The public land warrant and mining claim senses of locate are creatures of federal law and states with significant public land histories (western states, former territories). In eastern states where the original land grants predate federal land law, this usage is largely historical. The road location sense remains active in state administrative and municipal law but is governed by individual state enabling statutes, making generalization unreliable.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — LOCATION (Land) for the full treatment of the act of location in American land law. See SURVEY AND DESCRIPTION for the relationship between location and the mechanics of deed description. See PUBLIC LANDS for the land warrant and mining claim context.
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