Definition
"Tions" is not a legal term. It is the plural form of "tion," a common English suffix used to form nouns from verbs or adjectives (e.g., "commission," "jurisdiction," "corporation"). It has no independent legal definition and does not appear as a term of art in any jurisdiction.
The source material provided under this headword appears to consist of fragmentary excerpts from multiple unrelated legal entries — including definitions relating to commissions to take testimony, corporate consolidation or merger, ecclesiastical and eleemosynary corporations, bills of exceptions, confidential communications, and religious corporations — that have been incorrectly aggregated or truncated under the label "TIONS." These fragments are not definitions of a term called "tions." They are partial entries for distinct legal concepts that happened to share a common suffix in their original headwords (e.g., "Commissions," "Consolidations," "Corporations," "Communications," "Exceptions").
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "TIONS" as a headword in a digitized legal dictionary corpus should treat it as a data artifact, not a legal concept. It most likely represents an OCR (optical character recognition) or indexing error in which the leading characters of multiple headwords were stripped, leaving only the shared suffix fragment. This type of error is common in digitized nineteenth-century legal texts where column breaks, damaged page edges, or inconsistent scanning can cause the system to misread or truncate entry headwords.
If you are searching the Law Mind corpus and encounter this entry, the correct research path is to identify which underlying terms the fragments belong to and locate those entries directly. Based on the source material provided here, the relevant headwords are likely: COMMISSIONS (the testimony-taking authority fragment), CONSOLIDATIONS or CONSOLIDATION OF CORPORATIONS (the merger/amalgamation fragment), CORPORATIONS — ECCLESIASTICAL (the spiritual persons fragment), CORPORATIONS — ELEEMOSYNARY (the alms and bounty fragment), BILLS OF EXCEPTIONS — SETTLEMENT OF (the bill of exceptions fragment), CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATIONS or PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATIONS (the Bouvier's fragment on statements between persons in special relations), and RELIGIOUS CORPORATIONS (the final Bouvier's fragment).
Do not attempt to synthesize these fragments into a unified definition. They describe legally unrelated concepts.
Historical Dictionary Support
None of the five source dictionaries — Black's Law Dictionary, Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.), Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Rapalje & Lawrence, or Burrill's Law Dictionary — contains a headword "TIONS" as a term of art. The fragments attributed to this headword in the source material are recognizable portions of entries for established legal concepts. Bouvier's cross-reference "See MERGER" appearing under this headword further confirms that the fragment belongs to a consolidation or amalgamation entry, not to any term called "tions."