For Googlers that don’t expect duplicates or are fine with the default duplicate handling policy:
List("a" -> 1, "b" -> 2, "a" -> 3).toMap
// Result: Map(a -> 3, c -> 2)
As of 2.12, the default policy reads:
Duplicate keys will be overwritten by later keys: if this is an unordered collection, which key is in the resulting map is undefined.