Definition
A pollicitation is an offer or promise that has not yet been accepted by the person to whom it is made. The term originates in civil law and designates the preliminary, unilateral stage of a potential agreement — the moment when one party has extended a promise or proposal but no mutual assent has yet formed. Because acceptance is absent, a pollicitation does not rise to the level of a contract. It is, in essence, a promise suspended in legal incompleteness.
The concept captures something the common law does not name with equal precision: the offer as a discrete legal object, existing in the interval between its making and either acceptance or revocation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A voluntary engagement, or a paper containing it; a promise. Also, a promise without mutuality — a promise which has not been accepted by the person to whom it is made.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A voluntary engagement, or a paper containing it; a promise. In legal use, a promise without mutuality; a promise which has not been accepted by the person to whom it is made.
The ordinary definitions are narrower than they appear. Everyday usage treats a pollicitation as simply a promise, but the legal meaning turns on the absence of acceptance. The emphasis is not on what has been given but on what is still missing — the other party's assent. A promise accepted and relied upon is no longer a pollicitation; it has either become a contract or transformed into something the law evaluates under different doctrines entirely.
Common Confusion
Pollicitation is sometimes used interchangeably with offer, and in most practical contexts the distinction is harmless. But the terms carry different conceptual weight. An offer is analyzed in common law as an act inviting acceptance, carrying rules about revocability, lapse, and counter-offers. A pollicitation is the civil law framing of the same moment, with emphasis on the unilateral character of the promise and its incompleteness as a binding obligation. Researchers working across civil and common law sources should be alert to the different doctrinal frameworks attached to each term, even when the underlying factual situation is identical.
Why It Matters in Research
Pollicitation is a civil law term of art and will appear with notable frequency in sources drawing on Roman law, French law, or the Scottish and Louisiana traditions. Researchers working in common law corpora will rarely encounter it in judicial opinions, but will find it in treatises — particularly contract law treatises of the nineteenth century that were written in dialogue with civil law scholarship.
The primary navigational challenge is that pollicitation marks the same legal moment that common law sources call an offer, but the surrounding doctrine differs. A pollicitation in civil law analysis may be discussed in terms of Grotius or Pothier rather than in terms of the common law rules governing offer and acceptance. Researchers tracing the intellectual history of contract formation doctrine need to follow both threads to get a complete picture.
Louisiana is the obvious jurisdictional pressure point. Because Louisiana civil law derives from French and Spanish sources, the terminology of pollicitation, offer, and promise maps differently there than in common law states. Sources from Louisiana courts and commentators may use pollicitation with greater precision and frequency than sources from any other American jurisdiction.
The term also appears in comparative law scholarship and in works analyzing international commercial law, where civil law concepts of unilateral promise and offer continue to have operative significance. Researchers working on topics such as firm offers, option contracts, or pre-contractual liability will find pollicitation a useful entry point into the civilian side of that literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a pollicitation is an offer not yet accepted. The definition is compact and consistent across Black's first and second editions and Bouvier's.
Bouvier's entry is the most substantively developed. It adds the essential contrast with contract — a contract requires concurrence of intention in two parties, while a pollicitation involves only one — and cites Grotius and Pothier directly. This is valuable because it situates the term explicitly within the civilian theoretical tradition and signals that the sources needed to understand it fully are not common law cases but civilian jurists.
Black's second edition adds a citation to McCulloch v. Eagle Insurance Co., 1 Pick. (Mass.) 283, which is the most significant addition across the editions. That citation connects the abstract civilian concept to an American common law court grappling with offer and acceptance questions, and it suggests that nineteenth-century American courts occasionally used civil law vocabulary in contract disputes even outside Louisiana.
All three dictionaries cite Langdell's Contracts (§ 1) as a primary reference. This is notable: Langdell's casebook and accompanying summary, which founded the modern American law school curriculum, opens with exactly this concept. Researchers interested in the history of American contract law pedagogy have a direct link here between civilian terminology and the Harvard tradition.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the modern doctrinal status of the term. None of them trace what happened to pollicitation as American contract law became increasingly systematized through the Restatements, which use offer and acceptance rather than civilian vocabulary. Researchers should not assume that the doctrinal framework surrounding pollicitation in civilian sources maps cleanly onto Restatement analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
Louisiana is the primary American jurisdiction where pollicitation retains active doctrinal relevance, given the state's civilian heritage. In civil law jurisdictions generally — including Quebec and most of continental Europe — the concept connects to broader doctrines of unilateral promise and pre-contractual obligation that have no direct common law equivalent. Researchers working in purely common law contexts will treat pollicitation as historical or comparative vocabulary rather than operative doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Offer and Acceptance; Contract Formation; Civil Law and Common Law Compared