(A) practice. A judicial command or precept issued by a court or magistrate, directing the proper officer to enforce a judgment, sentence or decree. (B) Mandatum or commission, contracts. Sir William Jones defines a mandate to be a bailment of goods without reward, to be carried from place to place, or to have some act performed about them. Jones’ Bailm. 52; 2 Ld. Raym. 909, 913. This seems more properly an enumeration of the various sorts of mandates than a definition of the contract. According to Mr. Justice Story, it is a bailment of personal property, in regard to which the bailee engages to do some act without reward. Bailm. 137. And Mr. Chancellor Kent defines it to be when one undertakes, without recompense, to do some act for the other in respect to the thing bailed. 2. From the very term of the definition, three things are necessary to create a mandate. First, that there should exist something which should be the matter of the contract; secondly, that it should be done gratuitously; and thirdly, that the parties. should voluntarily intend to enter into the contract. (C) civil law. Mandates were the instructions which the emperor addressed to public functionaries, which were to serve as rules for their conduct. 2. These mandates resembled those of the pro-consuls, the mandata jurisdictio, and were ordinarily binding on the legates or lieutenants of the emperor of the imperial provinces, and, there they had the authority of the principal edicts.