Definition
A tuation is a written submission presented to a trial judge containing statements of fact and the applicable law, accompanied by a request that the judge incorporate those statements into the charge delivered to the jury. In practice, it functions as a formal vehicle by which a party communicates to the court the legal propositions and factual characterizations it wishes the jury to receive as instructions.
The term is closely associated with the practice of submitting requested jury charges — a party's attempt to shape the legal framework the jury will apply when deliberating. A tuation may address a single point of law or encompass the full body of instructions a party believes should govern the case.
Common Confusion
Tuation is easily conflated with a brief, a paper book, and jury instructions generally, because all four concepts involve written legal submissions to a court. The distinctions matter for research purposes:
— A brief argues the law to the court for the court's benefit in deciding legal questions; a tuation is directed at shaping what the jury hears.
— A paper book is a compiled record or submission, often broader in scope, not necessarily framed as a request for jury charge.
— Jury instructions (or the charge itself) are what the judge ultimately delivers; a tuation is the party's requested input into that process, not the output.
Bouvier's cross-references all four, signaling that historical sources treat these terms as related but distinct procedural instruments. Researchers should not treat them as interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
Tuation is an archaic procedural term that has largely disappeared from modern legal vocabulary. Researchers encountering it in historical case reports, trial records, or treatises — particularly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — should understand it as the functional predecessor to what modern practice calls a "requested jury instruction" or "prayer for instruction."
The practical danger in corpus research is anachronism: applying modern jury-instruction doctrine to evaluate what a tuation accomplished, or vice versa. The procedural rules governing when a court was required to adopt, modify, or reject a tuation varied considerably by jurisdiction and era. Failure to find the term in modern indices is expected — search instead under jury charge, requested instruction, points for charge, or prayer for charge depending on the jurisdiction and period.
Pennsylvania practice is worth particular attention. Pennsylvania historically used the term "points for charge" to describe the same procedural device, and some historical sources use tuation and points for charge interchangeably in that jurisdiction's context. Researchers working in Pennsylvania court records may find tuations filed under either label.
Because Bouvier cross-references this term to Brief, Paper Book, Charge, and Instruction, a full understanding of tuation's research context requires tracing how each of those related concepts was understood at the time of the source document under examination.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is notably spare: tuation is defined functionally by what it does (statements of fact and law submitted with a request to charge) rather than by any formal procedural rule governing its use or effect. Bouvier does not elaborate on the consequences of a court's refusal to adopt a tuation, nor does it address whether a party's failure to submit one waived any right to a particular instruction — questions that would be central to any litigated dispute involving the term.
The cross-references Bouvier supplies (Brief, Paper Book, Charge, Instruction) are the more substantively developed entries for understanding the surrounding procedural ecosystem. Researchers should consult those entries in Bouvier directly to reconstruct the full picture of trial-court submission practice in the period when this term was in active use.
No other historical legal dictionaries in the present corpus contain an entry for tuation, which itself signals the term's limited circulation and likely regional or period-specific usage.
Jurisdictional Note
The term appears to have had currency primarily in American practice during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It does not appear as a recognized term in modern federal or state procedural codes, which uniformly employ "requested jury instructions" or equivalent formulations. Researchers should treat tuation as jurisdiction-sensitive and era-specific until affirmative evidence of its use in a particular court's practice is established.