Definition
Producing gain, profit, or revenue. In legal contexts, "lucrative" most often appears as a modifier describing offices or arrangements that carry financial compensation or yield measurable economic benefit to the holder or party.
1. Lucrative office. A public or private office that carries attached compensation — whether a fixed salary, fees, or other remuneration — as distinguished from an honorary or gratuitous office held without pay.
2. Lucrative bailment. A bailment from which the bailee derives benefit, such as compensation for services rendered in connection with the bailed property. Contrasted with a gratuitous bailment, where the bailee receives nothing. The distinction carries legal weight because the standard of care owed by the bailee varies depending on whether the bailment is lucrative or gratuitous.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Producing a surplus; profitable.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Yielding lucre; gainful; profitable; making increase of money or goods. Webster's also records an obsolete sense meaning "greedy of gain."
The legal and common meanings are close but not identical. In ordinary speech, "lucrative" modifies ventures, deals, or careers and focuses on the magnitude of profit. In law, the term is used more precisely as a formal classificatory marker — particularly to sort offices and bailments into categories that carry different legal consequences. A lucrative office need not be highly profitable; it needs only to carry some compensation. The legal usage is binary (lucrative vs. gratuitous or honorary) where the common usage is scalar.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Lucrative office: An office to which compensation attaches, distinguishing it from an honorary office. The classification matters in contexts involving conflicts of interest, disqualification rules, and eligibility to hold multiple offices simultaneously.
Lucrative bailment: A bailment for the mutual benefit of both parties, or specifically for the benefit of the bailee. This subtype imposes a higher standard of care on the bailee than a gratuitous bailment. See also: BAILMENT.
Lucrative title (civil law tradition): In some historical usage drawn from civilian sources, a title acquired without consideration — a gift or inheritance — as opposed to an onerous title acquired by exchange or purchase. This sense, essentially the inverse of the modern common meaning, appears in older treatises and requires attention when reading historical sources.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap with "lucrative" is the civil law sense of lucrative title, which runs directly counter to the term's modern meaning. In civilian-influenced jurisdictions and in older common law treatises drawing on Roman law, lucrum could describe a windfall or gratuitous acquisition — something received without giving value in return. A researcher encountering "lucrative title" in a 19th-century Louisiana opinion or a treatise on succession law is reading about a title acquired by gift or inheritance, not one that was profitable to acquire. Confusing this with the modern sense produces a complete misreading.
For office-holder research, the lucrative/honorary distinction appears most frequently in cases involving dual-office-holding prohibitions, constitutional incompatibility clauses, and public corruption statutes. Historical sources may treat the classification as settled where modern law has redefined compensation to include non-monetary benefits.
In bailment research, the lucrative/gratuitous distinction governs negligence standards and is a necessary threshold question in any historical bailment dispute. The labels are stable across the historical dictionaries, but the underlying care standards have been partially absorbed into general negligence doctrine in many jurisdictions, making the older categorical framework less operationally distinct than it once was.
The obsolete sense of lucrative meaning "greedy of gain" (noted by Webster's 1913 and visible in the Latimer quotation) has no legal relevance but can create confusion in very early legal writing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) and Anderson's Dictionary of Law are in full agreement on the core legal usage: lucrative describes an office carrying compensation. Black's adds the lucrative bailment cross-reference and provides a working definition — "one which yields a revenue (in the form of fees or otherwise) or a fixed salary to the incumbent." Anderson's is characteristically brief, confirming that the term refers to attached compensation for services rendered.
Neither historical source addresses the civil law inversion (lucrative title as gratuitous acquisition), which is a gap researchers should note. That usage requires consultation of civilian sources and treatises on Roman-derived property law rather than the standard common law dictionaries.
Both sources treat "lucrative" as a modifier that does its legal work through contrast — lucrative vs. gratuitous in bailment, lucrative vs. honorary in office law. Neither explores the scalar, magnitude-focused sense dominant in ordinary modern usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The lucrative/gratuitous distinction in bailment law has been partially displaced in many U.S. jurisdictions by unified negligence standards, but the classification retains formal significance in jurisdictions that preserve the traditional three-category bailment framework. In Louisiana and other mixed-jurisdiction states with civilian heritage, "lucrative title" as a term of art in succession and property law requires awareness of the civilian meaning.