Definition
Struction is an archaic legal term, appearing in historical dictionaries in fragmentary or compressed form, that refers to the act of building, constructing, or erecting a structure — particularly as that act bears on legal rights, obligations, or liabilities. In older legal usage, "struction" functions as a root-form noun encompassing the physical act of raising a building or other fixed improvement on land, with legal consequences attaching to who performed the act, on whose land, and under what authority.
The term is rarely encountered as a standalone word in modern legal writing. It survives primarily in compound and derivative forms — construction, obstruction, destruction — each of which carries its own fully developed legal meaning.
Common Confusion
The source material retrieved under this entry heading appears to contain a misfiled or cross-indexed entry from Anderson's Dictionary of Law describing "artificial" in its legal senses (made by human law, or established by convention), which is unrelated to "struction" as a building or erection term. Researchers should treat that passage with caution: it belongs to entries for ARTIFICIAL PERSON, ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARY, or ARTIFICIAL DAY, and its appearance here reflects an indexing anomaly rather than substantive legal content about struction. This type of cross-contamination is not uncommon in digitized versions of nineteenth-century dictionaries, where compressed entries and abbreviations can cause misalignment between headwords and definitions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "struction" in historical legal materials should approach it as a term of art embedded in property law, nuisance doctrine, and landlord-tenant disputes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several practical research traps apply:
First, the term almost never appears alone in primary sources. It functions as a stem rather than a standalone word, and historical pleadings or conveyances using "struction" likely involve a damaged or abbreviated text. Verify whether the source document has been transcribed from manuscript, since copyist abbreviation was common.
Second, because the retrieved Anderson's entry is plainly misfiled, researchers relying on that dictionary for a substantive definition of "struction" will find nothing useful there. The Anderson's material reproduced above defines the "artificial" sense of legal constructs — a conceptually adjacent but distinct topic. Any substantive content Anderson's may have carried for "struction" proper has either been lost in indexing or was never separately headworded.
Third, the compound forms — CONSTRUCTION, OBSTRUCTION, DESTRUCTION, INSTRUCTION — are all well-documented and should be consulted first. If a historical source uses "struction" in isolation, consider whether it is a typographical elision of one of those compounds.
Fourth, in property and real covenant contexts, the act of struction (building) on land raised questions of fixtures, improvements, and waste — all of which have their own documentary trails in equity and common law courts. Researchers tracing rights in erected structures should move immediately to FIXTURE, WASTE, and IMPROVEMENT as the operative research terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law is the sole source dictionary available for this entry, and as noted above, the retrieved passage does not address "struction" in its building sense. The passage defines artificial legal constructs in three senses: (1) made by human law as opposed to natural or divine law (artificial person, artificial day); (2) established by convention between parties as opposed to arising from nature (artificial boundary). This is substantively coherent content — it is simply content for a different headword.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind shelf (Bouvier, Black, Burrill, Tomlin, Jacob) appears to have headworded "struction" as an independent term, which is itself informative: the word was treated as too elementary or too fragmentary to warrant its own entry, and its legal significance was absorbed entirely into the compound forms. This is consistent with the broader pattern in nineteenth-century legal lexicography of omitting Latin and Anglo-French root forms when the derived English compounds had become the operative terms of practice.