Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning a letting or hiring for compensation — that is, a contract by which one party delivers a thing, performs work, or provides services to another in exchange for a price or reward. Locatio encompasses a family of related bailment and hire contracts, distinguished by what is being let: a physical thing, labor, or the completion of a specific task. The term appears in common law scholarship primarily through civil-law-influenced treatises on bailment, where writers borrowed the Roman taxonomy to organize contracts of hire that English law had not systematically classified.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Civil law and common law treatise writers recognized three principal subdivisions:
1. LOCATIO REI — The hiring out of a thing, whether personal property or real property, for a fixed period in exchange for payment. Corresponds roughly to what common law calls a bailment for hire or, in the real property context, a lease. The owner retains title; the hirer receives temporary use.
2. LOCATIO OPERIS FACIENDI — The hiring of labor or skill to perform work on a specific object or to accomplish a defined task. This category covers mechanics, artisans, carriers, warehousemen, wharfingers, and similar parties who take custody of another's property in order to do something with or to it. The delivery of the thing is incidental to the work contracted for, not the primary purpose of the arrangement.
3. LOCATIO OPERARUM — The hiring of personal services generally, without reference to a specific object to be worked upon. Closer to the modern employment contract or personal service agreement. The laborer contracts to place his time and effort at another's disposal.
A fourth category sometimes recognized in civil law materials is LOCATIO CUSTODIAE, the hiring of custody or safekeeping alone — corresponding to a paid deposit or professional storage arrangement. Some treatise writers treat this as a subdivision of locatio operis faciendi rather than a separate class.
The compound LOCATIO-CONDUCTIO names the entire bilateral transaction: the locator lets or delivers, the conductor hires or receives. The term emphasizes that the contract binds both sides and that the two acts — letting and hiring — are the inseparable halves of the same arrangement.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter locatio primarily in two contexts: civil law primary sources (Justinian's Institutes and Digest) and nineteenth-century common law treatises on bailment, particularly Story's Commentaries on the Law of Bailments and Kent's Commentaries. Both Story and Kent adopted the Roman taxonomy to give Anglo-American bailment law a systematic structure it otherwise lacked, so understanding the subdivisions of locatio is essential for reading those treatises critically.
The principal research trap is anachronism in the other direction: modern common law sources do not use this vocabulary at all. A researcher moving from nineteenth-century treatise material into twentieth-century case law will find no bridge term. The doctrines survived — bailment for hire, carrier liability, warehouseman's duty — but the Latin taxonomy was abandoned. Searching for locatio in post-1900 American legal materials will yield little.
For Scots law research, note that locatio was translated directly into the vernacular term "location" (not to be confused with the English word meaning a place), and appears in Stair's Institutions and related Scots institutional writers. The Scots usage preserves the civil law meaning intact and provides a useful bridge between Roman sources and common law development in a mixed jurisdiction.
Corpus connections worth noting: locatio sits at the intersection of the law of bailment, the law of contracts for services, and early carrier and innkeeper liability. A researcher tracing the duty of care owed by a paid bailee, or the origins of the common carrier's strict liability rule, will find the locatio framework organizing much of the foundational discussion.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries agree on the core meaning — a letting for hire — and all flag the civil law origin. Burrill is the most precise, citing the Institutes (3.25) and the Digest (19.2.2.1) directly and noting the alternative form locatum. Anderson is the most practically useful for research, providing the full three-part taxonomy with concrete examples (mechanic, warehouseman, wharfinger, agister, postmaster) that connect the abstract civil law categories to recognizable common law roles.
Black's first and second editions are thinner, primarily noting Story and Kent as the transmission point into common law scholarship and flagging the Scots translation. Neither edition develops the subtypes. Burrill's note that the term is "sometimes called locatum" is worth tracking: locatum refers to the thing let rather than the contract itself, and the two terms can appear in close proximity in older texts without being interchangeable.
None of the historical dictionaries grapples with the significant question of how imperfectly the Roman taxonomy mapped onto common law categories — a gap that Story himself acknowledged. The civil law's locatio operis faciendi, for example, sweeps in parties (common carriers, innkeepers) whose liability at common law rested on public duty rationales quite distinct from the consensual contract logic of the Roman framework.
Jurisdictional Note
Locatio as an operative legal term belongs to civil law jurisdictions and to the historical Scots common law. In American and English law it survives only as scholarly vocabulary in treatises and legal history. Louisiana, as a mixed civil law jurisdiction, preserves cognate concepts in its law of lease and hire, though the term itself is not used in modern Louisiana codification.