Definition
Recousse (French) is a term of French maritime law meaning recapture — specifically, the retaking of a vessel or cargo that had been seized by an enemy or captor. The concept addresses what legal consequences follow when a prize, once taken, is recovered by friendly forces or by the original owners before the captor has perfected a claim to it.
The term is principally encountered in insurance law, particularly in the context of marine insurance policies, where recapture affects the insurer's obligations and the rights of the original owner to recover the property. When goods or a vessel are recaptured, questions arise about whether a loss was sufficiently complete to trigger an insurance claim, and whether the recapture restores the insured to their prior position.
Common Confusion
Recousse should not be confused with recoupment, a distinct common law doctrine permitting a defendant to reduce a plaintiff's damages by asserting a related claim arising from the same transaction. The superficial phonetic similarity occasionally causes the terms to appear near each other in historical indexes, but they are wholly unrelated in origin and operation. Recousse concerns international maritime law and the physical retaking of property; recoupment concerns pleading and the reduction of civil liability.
Why It Matters in Research
Recousse is a narrow technical term that appears almost exclusively in treatises and authorities dealing with French maritime and insurance law. Researchers searching English-language legal sources will find little independent case law or statutory treatment of the term as such; it functioned primarily as a doctrinal label within the civil law tradition, imported into English-language dictionaries through French authority.
The critical navigation point: all three historical dictionary entries point to a single source — Emerigon's Traité des Assurances (chapter 12, section 23). Balthazard-Marie Emerigon's treatise (published 1783) was the dominant authority on marine insurance in the French civilian tradition and was widely cited in both English and American admiralty courts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Any serious research into recousse must go to Emerigon directly. English-language secondary treatment of the concept is thin precisely because common law systems developed parallel doctrines under different names — principally "recapture" and "postliminium" — without consistently borrowing the French terminology.
Researchers should also be alert to the relationship between recousse and the doctrine of postliminium (or postliminy), which governs restoration of rights upon recapture under the law of nations. The two concepts overlap: recousse names the act; postliminium names the legal consequence. Conflating them, or treating recousse as a fully self-contained doctrine in English-language sources, risks missing the substantive legal analysis, which is carried primarily under the postliminium heading in common law treatises.
For insurance research specifically: the question of whether a recapture defeats or revives an insurance claim was live in both English and American marine insurance law into the nineteenth century. If the recapture occurs before the insurer has paid, the loss may be treated as not absolute. If the insurer has already paid, subrogation and abandonment questions arise. These questions appear in English case law and American treatises under "recapture" rather than "recousse."
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries — Black's (1st edition), Black's (2nd edition), and Burrill's — are in complete agreement: recousse is French, it means recapture, and Emerigon is the sole cited authority. The entries are essentially identical across all three, which reflects the term's status as a borrowed civilian term with no independent English-language development. None of the dictionaries attempts substantive doctrinal elaboration, which accurately signals the term's function: it is a label, not a developed body of doctrine in the common law tradition.
What the historical dictionaries omit is significant. They do not address the insurance consequences of recapture, the relationship to postliminium, or any English or American case law applying the concept. This is a deliberate limitation of scope, not an oversight — recousse as a term of art was received into English legal vocabulary primarily as a citation anchor pointing back to French authority, not as a freestanding common law concept.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Marine Insurance; Postliminium; Prize and Capture.