The names “John Doe” and “Jane Doe” are placeholders used in legal documents to represent people whose names are either unknown or can’t be revealed. There’s a word for placeholders like that: “kadigan.” And there are other kadigans besides Jane and John.
Blackacre is a kadigan for a piece of property, like an acre of land. If there’s a second piece of property being compared to the first, there’s a kadigan for that, too: whiteacre. These go back at least to the 1600s. Although “kadigan” is an obscure term (you won’t even find it in all dictionaries), it’s apparently a common bit of legal jargon. If you look it up in Wikipedia it doesn’t have its own page, but it does land on the page for “placeholders”, which points out that it’s also a synonym for “thingamajig.”
Blackacre was used during the Reconstruction Era after the US Civil War to refer to parcels of land given to emancipated African-Americans.
Blackacre is also a somewhat popular term in law schools. It’s the title of a literary journal at the University of Texas School of Law, a weekly student event at Vanderbilt Law School, and the name of a journal for final-year students at the University of Sydney Law School. Not only that, Blackacre Prep is a tutoring service run by Yale Law School grads.
Still related to law but not law schools specifically, a judge in the Kentucky Court of Appeals inspired the name of the Blackacre State Nature Preserve and Historic Homestead. The Black Acre Brewing Company in Indiana was founded in 2011 — the founders met in law school. And speaking of beer, the New Republic Brewing Company produces a beer called Kadigan.
If you play NationStates, an online nation simulation game, one of the nations you can choose is The Commonwealth of Central Kadigan. Their motto is “we are free and happy; but poor as dirt!” Their economy is very large (584 trillion dinars!) and its biggest industry is book publishing. Although their average income tax rate is 96.2%, the population (all 9.9 billion of them!) are described as “compassionate, democratic, and cheerful.”
