Napoleonic law in Louisiana is a common shorthand for the state’s civil law tradition, a system built on a written code rather than on judge-made precedent. Louisiana is the only state in the country that uses this approach for its private law, and it traces back to French and Spanish colonial rule that survived the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The practical effect is that marriages, property, contracts, personal injury claims, and inheritances in Louisiana follow rules that look different from the ones used in the other 49 states.
The nickname is only loosely accurate. When Louisiana organized its first body of private law in 1808 as the Digest of the Civil Laws of the Territory of Orleans, drafters pulled heavily from the French Napoleonic Code of 1804, but they also carried forward Spanish and Roman legal concepts that had governed the territory for generations. Louisiana expanded that work into a full Civil Code in 1825 and has revised it many times since. What has not changed is the basic method: the law lives in the code.
Where Civil Law Applies in Louisiana and Where It Doesn’t
The civil law tradition in Louisiana governs private law: property, family matters, contracts, inheritance, and personal injury. It does not govern criminal cases. Criminal law in Louisiana follows the common law method used across the country, with binding precedent and judge-made principles.
Commercial law sits in between. Every state has adopted the Uniform Commercial Code, and Louisiana has adopted parts of it but not all, because the Civil Code already covers areas like the sale of goods in detail.
So if you are charged with a crime in New Orleans, the courtroom works much like one in Houston or Atlanta. If you are getting divorced, buying property, writing a will, or suing over a car accident, you are in civil law territory.
How the Code Works Instead of Precedent
The Louisiana Civil Code is the starting point for legal analysis. Article 2 declares legislation to be the solemn expression of legislative will, which means the written articles are the primary authority. Article 3 allows custom to fill a gap only when the code is silent, and custom can never override legislation.
Courts interpret the articles rather than making new rules from the bench. Louisiana follows a principle called jurisprudence constante: no single appellate decision binds lower courts the way a precedent would in a common law state. The law becomes settled only after a long series of consistent interpretations. A well-established line of cases still carries heavy persuasive weight, and lower courts rarely break from it without reason, but the code remains the authority.
For an ordinary reader, this means a Louisiana attorney researching your question starts with the specific code article that governs it, not with a stack of court opinions.
Marriage and Community Property
Louisiana is one of nine community property states, and its version comes straight out of the civil law tradition. Under the default rules, most property acquired during a marriage belongs equally to both spouses, no matter who earned the income or whose name is on the title.
Article 2338 defines community property broadly. It includes anything acquired during the marriage through either spouse’s effort or skill, property bought with community funds, gifts made jointly to the spouses, and income generated by community assets.
Separate property stays with the spouse who owns it. Under Article 2341, that covers assets acquired before the marriage, property received by one spouse through inheritance or an individual gift, and assets bought with separate funds. The source of the money controls, not the name on the deed. A house paid for with community funds is community property even if only one spouse is listed as the buyer.
Couples can opt out through a matrimonial agreement, Louisiana’s version of a prenuptial agreement. Without one, the community property rules apply automatically from the date of the marriage.
Usufruct, Naked Ownership, and Servitudes
Louisiana property law uses terms borrowed from Roman law that do not appear in other states. The most important one in daily life is the split between usufruct and naked ownership.
A usufruct, defined in Article 535, is the right to use and enjoy someone else’s property for a limited time. The usufructuary can live in a house, collect rent from tenants, or harvest crops from land they do not own. The naked owner holds the title but cannot interfere with the usufructuary’s rights during the usufruct, and under Articles 603 through 606 cannot make alterations or impair the usufructuary’s enjoyment.
This arrangement shows up constantly in Louisiana estate planning. A surviving spouse often receives a usufruct over the family home while the children inherit the naked ownership. When the usufruct ends, full ownership consolidates in the children automatically.
Louisiana also uses predial servitudes where other states would say easements. Article 646 defines a predial servitude as a charge on one piece of property for the benefit of another, with the two properties belonging to different owners. A right-of-way across a neighbor’s land to reach a public road is the classic example.
Contracts Need Cause, Not Consideration
In most of the country, a contract requires consideration: each side gives something of value in exchange for the other side’s promise. Louisiana skips this requirement and uses cause instead.
Article 1967 defines cause as the reason a party obligates himself. That is broader than consideration because it can support one-sided promises that would fail in a common law state. A promise to donate to a charity, for example, can be enforceable in Louisiana because the charitable motivation supplies the cause.
Article 1967 also builds in a reliance rule: when someone makes a promise they knew or should have known would induce reasonable reliance, the promise becomes binding. Common law states reach a similar result through the separate doctrine of promissory estoppel, but Louisiana folds the idea directly into the definition of cause.
Personal Injury: Delicts and the 51 Percent Bar
Louisiana does not use the word “tort” in its Civil Code. The equivalent is a delict. Article 2315 sets out the foundation in a single sentence: every act of a person that causes damage to another obligates the person at fault to repair it. That is the basis for almost every personal injury and property damage claim in the state.
When the injured person shares blame, Louisiana applies comparative fault under Article 2323. The court assigns a percentage of fault to everyone involved, including the injured person. If the injured person is less than 51 percent at fault, their damages are reduced by their share. At 51 percent or more, they recover nothing. That hard cutoff makes Louisiana stricter than pure comparative fault states, where even a mostly-at-fault plaintiff can collect something.
One exception: the 51 percent bar does not apply when the other party acted intentionally. A victim who was partly negligent can still recover fully against someone who hurt them on purpose.
Deadlines Are Called Prescription
What other states call a statute of limitations, Louisiana calls prescription, and the civil law tradition splits it into two kinds.
Liberative Prescription
Liberative prescription extinguishes a legal claim after a set period. For personal injury and property damage (delictual actions), the prescriptive period is two years from the date of the injury or damage. That is shorter than the three-year window many other states allow, and it catches people off guard. Miss it and the claim is gone, with narrow exceptions for minors and people under legal interdiction in product liability cases.
Acquisitive Prescription
Acquisitive prescription is Louisiana’s version of adverse possession, where long and continuous occupation of property can turn into ownership. Article 3475 allows acquisition after ten years when the possessor is in good faith and has a just title, meaning a document that would have transferred ownership if the seller had actually owned the property. Article 3486 provides a thirty-year route that requires neither good faith nor just title.
Inheritance and Forced Heirship
Louisiana’s inheritance system, called succession, contains one restriction on estate planning that exists nowhere else in the country: forced heirship. Under Article 1493, certain children cannot be completely cut out of a parent’s estate no matter what the will says.
Forced heirs include children who have not yet turned 24 at the time of the parent’s death, and children of any age who have a mental or physical condition that permanently prevents them from managing their own affairs or property.
Article 1495 sets the protected share. One forced heir is entitled to one-fourth of the estate. Two or more forced heirs share one-half. The remainder, called the disposable portion, is the part the parent can freely direct through a will or gift. A parent who tries to leave everything to a favorite charity while cutting out a 20-year-old child will see that plan partially overturned.
Smaller estates get a simpler path. Under the Code of Civil Procedure, an estate valued at $125,000 or less at the date of death qualifies as a small succession and can be handled through an affidavit rather than a full court proceeding. The threshold applies to Louisiana residents and to out-of-state residents who owned property in the state.