Definition
In land description law, locative calls are the specific references within a deed, patent, survey, or other instrument that tie a parcel of land to a definite, identifiable location on the ground. They are distinguished from general calls by their function: where a general call gives a broad description of a region or course, a locative call points to a concrete physical object — a monument, a tree, a watercourse, a neighboring boundary — that fixes the land's position with exactness.
The term operates within the broader system of calls used to describe land boundaries. When surveyors and courts must reconcile conflicting calls in a description, locative calls carry controlling weight because they speak to where the land actually is, not merely how large it is or in what general direction a line runs.
Common Confusion
Locative calls are frequently confused with directory calls, and the distinction matters enormously when descriptions conflict. A directory call gives the general course or region that orients the survey as a whole — for example, a reference to a county line or a general bearing. A locative call fixes a specific boundary point — a named stream, a marked corner stone, a witness tree. When the two conflict, courts give precedence to locative calls on the principle that a precise physical marker controls over a general direction. Researchers encountering boundary disputes in historical case law should identify which category a court assigned to each call before reading the holding, as the classification often decides the outcome.
Why It Matters in Research
Locative calls appear most heavily in early American land law — colonial grants, federal land patents, state warrants, and the entry systems of states like Kentucky and Virginia that relied on occupant-entry surveys. Researchers working in this corpus will find the term central to boundary dispute litigation through the nineteenth century, particularly in states carved from the original western territories where irregular metes-and-bounds surveys produced overlapping and inconsistent descriptions.
Several research traps to watch for:
First, the hierarchy of calls. Courts developed a priority rule governing which type of call controls when a description is internally inconsistent. The general order places natural monuments first, then artificial monuments, then adjacent boundaries, then courses and distances, then quantity. Locative calls — particularly those referencing natural or artificial monuments — sit near the top of this hierarchy. Cases that apply this rule do not always use the term "locative calls" explicitly, so researchers must recognize the doctrine even when the label is absent.
Second, state entry systems. In Kentucky and several other states, the entry and warrant system produced a body of case law specifically using the locative/directory distinction. Bouvier's citations to Bibb (Kentucky reports) reflect this concentration. Researchers in Kentucky land title history will encounter this vocabulary far more than those working in states that used the rectangular survey system established by the Land Ordinance of 1785, where township-and-range descriptions largely displaced metes-and-bounds locative problems.
Third, modern diminished relevance. In most contemporary real property practice, GPS coordinates, recorded plat systems, and standardized legal descriptions have reduced the practical frequency of locative call disputes. The term survives in title litigation involving old grants, riparian boundary changes, and disputes over original patent boundaries — especially in the American South and Appalachia. Researchers should not expect heavy modern case law volume on the term outside those contexts.
Fourth, corpus connections. Locative calls doctrine connects directly to the law of monuments as controlling evidence, the parol evidence rule as applied to deed descriptions, and the legal treatment of natural boundary changes (avulsion versus accretion). A boundary dispute research path that begins with locative calls will often lead to these adjacent bodies of doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are consistent in their core definition: locative calls are the specific, identifying references in a land description that allow the parcel to be exactly located. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's align closely, defining locative calls as references to landmarks, physical objects, or other identifiable points. Burrill adds the useful contrast phrase — "calls which designate the particular boundaries of lands, as distinguished from the general description" — making the directory/locative distinction more explicit than Black's does.
Bouvier's is the most practically oriented, immediately signaling through its case citations that the doctrine was most actively litigated in early nineteenth-century Kentucky and federal land cases (the Wheaton and Peters citations reference U.S. Supreme Court opinions on land patent construction). Black's second edition provides the cleanest definition and is the safest to cite for a baseline understanding. Neither Black's edition nor Burrill develops the priority hierarchy in their entries, which is a notable omission given how central that hierarchy is to the doctrine's practical application — researchers should not rely on the dictionary entries alone for guidance on how locative calls interact with conflicting distance or quantity calls.
One artifact of the Burrill source text suggests transcription interference from an adjacent entry; the reference to "the amount which the plaintiff might recover" in that entry is extraneous matter that does not belong to the locative calls definition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Boundaries and Land Description; Metes and Bounds Surveying; Land Patents and Federal Land Grants