Definition
In the law of civil procedure, positions (from the Latin *positio*) refers to a formal discovery device used in the civil law and equity practice, by which a party set out in numbered written paragraphs specific factual allegations that the opposing party was called upon to admit or deny. Each numbered paragraph was itself called a "position," and the document as a whole — the collection of such paragraphs — was called the positions. The procedure was available after the pleadings were complete and was directed at facts presumed to be within the adversary's personal knowledge.
The device served an interrogatory function: by compelling an adversary to respond to each position individually, a party could narrow the factual issues in dispute or secure admissions usable at trial.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Third-person singular simple present indicative of "to position" — i.e., to place or arrange something in a particular location or stance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Positions" as the plural of "position" — a place, situation, attitude, or proposition asserted as a basis of argument.
The legal term is not the everyday plural noun. In its technical procedural sense, "positions" names a formal instrument in civil and equity pleading — closer in function to what modern practice calls interrogatories or requests for admission — and carries none of the ordinary spatial or rhetorical meaning.
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Common Confusion
Positions should not be confused with interrogatories in the modern sense, though the two serve overlapping functions. Interrogatories under modern procedural rules (such as Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 33) are written questions addressed to a party; positions were written factual statements to which the adversary was required to respond. The underlying logic is similar — both compel disclosure from the opposing party — but the form and procedural context differ. Positions belong to the older civil law and equity tradition; the term largely disappeared from American practice as code pleading and then notice pleading replaced the older forms.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical equity records, admiralty proceedings, or civil law jurisdictions (including pre-codification Louisiana, Spanish colonial records, or ecclesiastical court materials) will encounter "positions" as a live procedural instrument, not merely an archaic label. When reading pre-nineteenth-century chancery or admiralty records, the document labeled "positions" or "interrogatories upon positions" is a substantive evidentiary filing, not merely supporting argument — its contents may be the primary record of what a party admitted or denied.
The term creates a terminological trap in two directions. First, modern researchers may misread "positions" as a generic reference to a party's legal arguments or stances rather than recognizing it as a distinct procedural document. Second, indexes in historical court records may file positions under various headings — "interrogatories," "examinations," or the Latin *positiones* — without consistency. Searches for discovery materials in pre-code equity cases should run all these variants.
The shift from positions to modern discovery is part of the broader nineteenth-century procedural reform story. Field Code reforms (New York, 1848) and subsequent code pleading movements collapsed many of the discrete equity instruments into consolidated discovery rules, and the term "positions" largely exited American legal vocabulary after that transition. Bouvier's treatment reflects practice as it stood in the first half of the nineteenth century, at the tail end of the term's active use.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the primary surviving description of positions in American legal reference literature. Bouvier explains that once pleadings were completed, each party wishing to examine the adversary prepared a detailed written statement of facts in support of the party's own pleadings — restricted to facts presumed within the adversary's knowledge. This statement was divided into numbered paragraphs, each called a *positio*, with the whole document taking the name "positions" from its component parts.
Bouvier's account reflects the civilian and equity heritage of the device. The civil law origin is evident in the Latin nomenclature and in the paragraph-by-paragraph structure, which mirrors continental procedural forms. What Bouvier does not address in detail is how English equity practice adapted the device, or the precise procedural consequences of a party's failure to respond — gaps that require supplementation from equity treatises of the period (Story's *Commentaries on Equity Pleading*, for example, addresses the examination of parties in equity and related discovery mechanisms).
No other source dictionary in the current Law Mind corpus addresses this term. The absence of treatment in later dictionaries is itself a data point: by the time Bouvier's successors were revised and expanded, the term had sufficiently receded from active American practice that extended treatment was no longer warranted.
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Jurisdictional Note
Positions as a distinct procedural instrument were most fully developed in equity courts and civil law jurisdictions. Louisiana practice, drawing on the French civil law tradition, retained related mechanisms longer than common law states. Researchers working in Louisiana colonial or antebellum records should expect the term and its French-language equivalents (*positions*, *articles*) to appear in procedural filings well into the nineteenth century.
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