Definition
In legal usage, a repertory is the register or minute-book maintained by a notary in which all contracts and instruments executed before that notary are inventoried and recorded in chronological order. The term originates in French civil law practice and refers specifically to the notary's official record of transactions — a running log that allows any act passed before that notary to be located, identified, and authenticated. The repertory is distinct from the instrument itself; it is the administrative record of the instrument's existence and execution.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A collection of things, or a place where such a collection is kept; also, the set of works performed by a theatrical or musical company; a theater presenting works from a rotating repertoire.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A place in which things are disposed in an orderly manner so they can be easily found, as an index or commonplace book; a treasury or storehouse.
The common meaning — a storehouse or organized collection — gestures toward the legal meaning but misses the decisive point: in legal usage, a repertory is not merely any organized record but a specific official register maintained by a notary as a matter of legal duty. The notary's repertory carries evidentiary weight and regulatory significance that no ordinary "collection" implies.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term almost exclusively meet it in the context of French law, Louisiana law, Quebec law, and other civil law jurisdictions that inherited the French notarial tradition. Several research traps apply:
First, the term is rare in common-law sources. If it appears in an English-language legal text, it is almost certainly discussing French, Louisianan, or continental civil law practice, and should be read with that frame in mind. Do not assume it signals a general archival or indexing concept.
Second, historical sources in the Law Mind corpus — particularly those dealing with Louisiana territorial law or colonial-era French and Spanish governance in North America — may use repertory where a modern researcher would expect terms like notarial register, protocol, or minute book. These terms are functional equivalents in different traditions; understanding their overlap prevents missed connections across the corpus.
Third, the relationship between the repertory and the original act (the instrument itself, retained in the notary's protocol) matters for document retrieval questions. The repertory locates; the protocol preserves. A historical source discussing access to notarial records may reference one or both, and conflating them leads to misunderstanding what records survive and in what form.
Fourth, Bouvier cites Dalloz while Black's cites Merlin — both French legal encyclopedists of the nineteenth century. Researchers following those citations should be aware they are working with secondary French legal literature, not code provisions or case law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (both editions) and Bouvier — are in close agreement: a repertory is the inventory or minutes kept by notaries of contracts executed before them. The definitions are nearly identical in substance, with Bouvier adding the specification that notaries are "required" to maintain these records, reflecting the mandatory character of the obligation under French notarial law.
The source dictionaries provide minimal elaboration beyond this core meaning. Neither Black's edition nor Bouvier explains the practical mechanics of how repertories were organized, how they related to the notary's protocol (the bound collection of original acts), or what legal consequences attached to failures in maintenance. Researchers needing that level of detail must go beyond these dictionaries to French civil law treatises or Louisiana notarial law sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not address — and what a researcher should note — is that the English word repertory was never naturalized into common-law legal practice. Its appearance in American legal dictionaries reflects the civilian inheritance of Louisiana and the scholarly tradition of comparative law, not any broader adoption into Anglo-American legal vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
The term has practical legal significance primarily in Louisiana, where the civilian notarial system descended from French and Spanish colonial practice. Quebec and other Canadian civil law jurisdictions use equivalent concepts under French and British colonial influence. In purely common-law jurisdictions, the term has no operative legal meaning and functions only as a term of art when discussing foreign or comparative law.