Art. 4064.Dative Tutor

Dative means court-appointed, the same sense the term carries elsewhere in Louisiana civil procedure, such as a dative testamentary executor appointed to administer a succession when no one with priority is available to serve. A dative tutor fills the analogous role for a minor: someone the court selects when the family-based categories — natural tutor, tutor by will, legal tutor — have been exhausted.

Article 4064 keeps this article brief because the mechanics are shared with legal tutorship. The court appoints a dative tutor under the circumstances the law provides, using the same petition, notice, and opposition procedure laid out in Articles 4065 through 4068.

Because a dative tutor lacks the built-in priority a legal tutor has, the notice and opposition steps in those following articles do real work here: they give the minor's relatives, and anyone else with a stake in the appointment, a chance to weigh in before the court settles on who will manage the child's person and property.