Definition
"Tations" does not appear in the legal dictionary corpus as an independent term with an established legal meaning. The source material attributed to this entry does not contain a definition for "tations" — the Bouvier's excerpt concerns the distinction between warranties and representations in insurance law, and the Burrill's excerpt addresses the phrase "to save" in the context of statutes of limitation, along with the Law French term "saver." Neither passage defines or meaningfully discusses "tations."
This entry cannot be completed as a substantive legal definition because no coherent source material exists for the term as submitted. The indexed content appears to be a cataloging or retrieval error — the dictionary text assigned to this headword belongs to other entries entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "tations" as a headword or index entry in historical legal dictionaries should treat it with caution. Several possibilities explain its appearance:
First, it may be a truncation artifact. Historical legal dictionaries — particularly Bouvier's and Burrill's — were typeset in dense columns and digitized from scanned pages. Optical character recognition and manual indexing errors frequently produce fragment headwords from longer terms. "Tations" may be the tail end of a word such as CITATIONS, RECITATIONS, QUOTATIONS, or LIMITATIONS, severed from its prefix during processing.
Second, it may reflect a Latin or Law French suffix that was mistakenly isolated. Legal Latin frequently employs the suffix "-tations" (as in citationes, meaning citations or summonses), and a scanned or transcribed entry could strip the root.
Third, researchers should cross-reference the surrounding entries in both Bouvier's and Burrill's — the displaced content about warranties and the statute of limitations phrase "to save" — to locate the correct headwords those passages belong to. The Bouvier's text properly belongs under WARRANTY or REPRESENTATION (Insurance). The Burrill's text properly belongs under SAVE or SAVING, with the Law French material under SAVER or FET ASSAVOIR.
Do not treat this headword as a confirmed legal term without independent verification in a physical or authoritative digital edition of either dictionary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Neither Bouvier's Law Dictionary nor Burrill's Law Dictionary contains a substantive entry for "tations" as a standalone legal term. The passages indexed under this headword are displaced fragments:
The Bouvier's excerpt — concerning the difference between warranties and representations in an insurance policy context, specifically that warranty answers must be literally true — belongs to a comparative discussion of those two doctrines, most likely under WARRANTY or the cross-reference notes within REPRESENTATION.
The Burrill's excerpt addresses the phrase "to save" a debt or demand from being barred by the statute of limitations, citing Holthouse's Law Dictionary, followed by Law French glosses on "saver" (to know), drawing on Kelham's glossary of Norman and Old French legal terms. This material belongs under SAVE, SAVER, or STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS.
Historical legal dictionaries of the nineteenth century are prone to indexing fragmentation in digital collections. Bouvier and Burrill both organized their works with extensive cross-references, and the displacement of these passages suggests an indexing gap rather than any genuine entry for "tations."