Definition
A technical pleading phrase historically used in indictments and criminal informations to allege that the defendant's conduct constituted a breach of the peace. The phrase typically appeared in the formal charging language "against the peace of the state" or, under English common law, "against the peace of our lord the King" — signaling that the offense disturbed the public order maintained by sovereign authority. It is not a substantive legal standard in itself but a formulaic element of criminal pleading inherited from common law practice.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No standard entry. The phrase does not appear in ordinary modern English outside of legal and historical contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not defined as a standalone entry. "Peace" in Webster's 1913 carries its familiar sense of freedom from disturbance, tranquility, or absence of war.
The gap here is not between a common and legal meaning of the phrase itself — the phrase has no meaningful life outside the law — but between what the words seem to say and what they actually do. A modern reader might take "against the peace" as a substantive description of violent or disorderly conduct. In legal usage, it was a term of art in pleading: a required formal recitation rather than a factual description, and its presence or absence in an indictment could affect the validity of the charge.
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Common Confusion
"Against the peace" is sometimes confused with "breach of the peace" as if the two are interchangeable. They are related but distinct. Breach of the peace is a substantive legal concept — an offense or category of conduct. "Against the peace" is a pleading formula asserting that a breach occurred. An indictment might allege an act "against the peace" without the underlying charge being formally labeled a breach of the peace offense, and vice versa. Researchers reviewing historical indictments should not treat the appearance of this phrase as evidence that the charge was specifically a breach of the peace crime, as the formula was applied broadly across many categories of criminal offense.
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Why It Matters in Research
This phrase matters almost exclusively in the context of historical legal documents — indictments, criminal informations, and grand jury presentments from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Researchers working in early American or English criminal records will encounter it routinely and need to recognize it as boilerplate rather than substantive content.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the Latin equivalent contra pacem appears interchangeably in earlier sources and in more formal legal writing. A search for "against the peace" in translated or transcribed records may miss instances where the Latin form was retained.
Second, the phrase's presence in a document tells a researcher very little about the nature of the underlying offense. It was appended to charges ranging from assault and riot to more technical statutory violations. Do not use it as a keyword to narrow a search to violence or disorder cases — it is too broad for that purpose.
Third, as pleading requirements relaxed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly following the adoption of simplified criminal procedure codes, the phrase gradually disappeared from standard charging instruments. Its absence in modern indictments is not a substantive change in law but a procedural one. Researchers tracing the history of a particular offense should not interpret the dropping of this formula as any change in the underlying doctrine.
Fourth, in jurisdictions that retained strict common law pleading requirements longest — some southern states and jurisdictions with strong English legal inheritance — the phrase persisted well into the twentieth century. The date of disappearance varies enough by jurisdiction to matter when dating documents or assessing the formality of a particular court's practice.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines the phrase concisely as a technical phrase used in alleging a breach of the peace, directing readers to the entry for CONTRA PACEM. This is accurate but minimal. Black's treatment reflects the phrase's status as received common law boilerplate — well understood by practitioners of the era, requiring little elaboration.
What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is any discussion of what happened when the phrase was missing. Common law pleading doctrine in some jurisdictions held that failure to include the formula could render an indictment defective, making it subject to challenge by demurrer or motion in arrest of judgment. That procedural consequence is where the phrase's real legal significance lies, and it is largely absent from dictionary treatment. Researchers needing that dimension should turn to treatises on criminal pleading rather than dictionary sources.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase derives from English common law and traveled into American practice through colonial inheritance. Its persistence and the consequences of its omission varied by state depending on whether the jurisdiction followed strict common law pleading or adopted reformed codes. Federal courts and most states had substantially abandoned the requirement by the mid-twentieth century.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Disorderly Conduct and Breach of Peace — The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia
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