Definition
In Roman civil law, an agreement by which a debtor appointed a specific day or time at which payment would be made to a creditor, or more broadly, a promise to pay a debt. The term also carried a secondary sense: an agreement by which a person undertook to recover something on behalf of another — essentially a promise of recovery or collection made to a creditor or claimant.
PECU is a term of Roman civil law origin with no direct modern common-law counterpart. It functioned as a form of stipulated payment arrangement, fixing the time or manner of satisfying an existing obligation rather than creating a new one.
Why It Matters in Research
PECU will appear almost exclusively in sources dealing with Roman civil law, civil law jurisdictions, or early common law treatises that drew on civilian learning. Researchers working in historical contract or debt materials should understand that PECU was not a substantive obligation in itself but a procedural or temporal agreement layered atop an existing debt — it fixed when or how an obligation would be discharged, not whether one existed.
The Black's Law Dictionary entry, drawing from Wharton, is notably compressed and somewhat garbled in surviving transcriptions, which creates a real hazard: the secondary definition ("an agreement to recover to a person who undertook to recover it") is fragmentary and likely reflects a copying or typesetting error in the original source. Researchers should not treat that second definition as a standalone legal concept without consulting Wharton's Law Lexicon directly to verify the intended text.
Because PECU derives from civilian tradition, it is unlikely to appear in common-law case reporters or statutes. It surfaces in treatises, legal dictionaries, and scholarly commentary on Roman law or the civil law roots of contract doctrine. If encountered in a historical document, the surrounding context — creditor, debtor, day certain, promise to pay — will almost always confirm the payment-arrangement meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary is the primary available source, and it attributes the definition to Wharton. The entry in Black's is brief to the point of incompleteness, and the second half of the definition as it appears in some editions is textually corrupted or truncated, likely a printing artifact. Wharton's Law Lexicon (various 19th-century editions) should be consulted as the upstream authority.
No material divergence exists across historical sources because the term appears so rarely outside civilian treatises. The historical dictionaries that carry PECU largely copy from one another in the Wharton tradition. What the historical sources do not address is the precise relationship between PECU and cognate Roman law concepts such as PACTUM (a broader informal agreement) or STIPULATIO (a formal verbal contract). Researchers working in Roman law sources will find those entries more developed and analytically richer.
Jurisdictional Note
PECU is a term of Roman civil law with no recognized modern application in U.S. common-law jurisdictions. It may appear in Louisiana legal history or other civil-law-influenced jurisdictions where Roman law concepts were more directly received, but even there it functions as a historical reference rather than operative legal terminology.