Definition
In its primary legal sense, chance is an accident — an unexpected, unforeseen, or unintended consequence of an act. It is the conceptual opposite of intention, design, or contrivance. When a harmful result occurs by chance, criminal culpability is typically diminished or eliminated because the law generally requires a mental state of intent, knowledge, or recklessness to support criminal liability. A death caused purely by chance, with no foresight and no intention, is not murder but misadventure.
In the law of torts, chance acquires a distinct secondary meaning through the loss of chance doctrine: a measurable statistical probability — usually a chance of recovery or survival — that a plaintiff alleges was diminished or destroyed by a defendant's negligent act. In this sense, chance is itself the thing of value that has been lost, and it becomes the unit of damage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An opportunity or possibility; random occurrence or luck; the probability of something happening; what befalls a person by fate.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A supposed material or psychical agent other than force, law, or purpose; fortune; fate — often personified, though Webster's notes that chance and accident signify nothing that is truly an agent or cause of any event.
The ordinary meanings of chance run toward probability, opportunity, and fate. The primary legal meaning is narrower and more adversarial: chance in criminal law is specifically the negation of intent. Where common usage treats chance as a neutral description of how things happen, the legal definition is doing the work of absolving or assigning culpability. The tort law meaning of chance — a probabilistic opportunity for recovery that can itself be damaged — is entirely absent from common usage.
Common Confusion
CHANCE VS. ACCIDENT
Chance and accident are closely related in historical legal usage but are not identical. Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) draws a pointed distinction: an accident is the intervention of some unlooked-for circumstance that prevents an expected result; chance is the uncalculated effect of mere luck — as when a shot discharged at random strikes an unintended target. The difference matters when courts assess foreseeability and degree of culpability. Burrill similarly treats chance as applying to injurious acts whose consequences were neither intended nor foreseen by the actor. Bouvier simply redirects to ACCIDENT, collapsing the distinction. Researchers should not assume the two terms are interchangeable across all sources.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Loss of Chance (Doctrine): In modern tort law, a cause of action — or a theory of damages — arising when a defendant's negligence deprives a plaintiff of a measurable statistical probability of a better medical outcome. The plaintiff need not prove that proper treatment would have saved them; they prove that the chance of survival or recovery was itself reduced by negligence. Courts are divided on whether loss of chance is a standalone injury or merely a damages-calculation method. See Encyclopedia cross-references above.
Chance Medley: A historical common-law term for a killing that occurs during a sudden affray — a form of homicide regarded as less culpable than murder because it arises from sudden passion rather than premeditation. The element of chance in the affray mitigates the inference of design. Anderson's directs researchers from CHANCE to MEDLEY for this usage.
Why It Matters in Research
The word chance appears across the Law Mind corpus in two largely separate legal universes that rarely acknowledge each other. Researchers must distinguish which sense is operative.
In criminal law sources — including all six shelf dictionaries — chance is a term of exculpation. When historical opinions or treatises speak of a death happening "by chance," they are making a claim about the absence of mens rea. This usage is well-preserved in historical sources and consistent across jurisdictions.
The loss of chance doctrine is almost entirely absent from the historical dictionary shelf. It is a modern tort development — principally from the second half of the twentieth century — and researchers will find no useful guidance on it in Burrill, Bouvier, Black's First or Second, or Rapalje. For loss of chance issues, the Encyclopedia entries above are the correct starting point.
Navigational trap: Rapalje & Lawrence's entry for chance appears to be a fragment discussing the chamberlain's office and contingency fee agreements — this is almost certainly a digitization or pagination error in the source corpus, not a genuine definition of chance. Researchers should disregard it as substantive content on this term.
Anderson's brief definition — that a thing happens by chance to a person which is "neither brought about nor pre-estimated by his understanding" — is the most philosophically precise formulation in the shelf sources and usefully captures the dual requirement: the actor neither caused it deliberately nor anticipated it.
Jurisdictional variation in the loss of chance doctrine is significant. Some states recognize it as an independent injury; others reject it entirely or limit it to cases where the plaintiff's pre-negligence chance of survival exceeded fifty percent. This variation does not appear in the historical dictionary sources and must be researched through modern case law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The shelf sources treat chance as a criminal law term, and their definitions are in substantial agreement. Black's First and Black's Second offer identical core language: chance is "an accident; an unexpected, unforeseen, or unintended consequence of an act; a fortuitous event" and "the opposite of intention, design, or contrivance." Burrill expands this formulation usefully, noting that chance applies to "injurious acts, such as the killing of a person, which happen as the consequences of other acts by other persons, where such consequences are not intended or foreseen." This clarifies that chance is not merely about the actor's state of mind in isolation — it describes a causal relationship in which harmful consequences flow from an act without any mental link between the actor and the result.
Black's Second is alone among the shelf sources in distinguishing chance from accident with precision, and that distinction is worth preserving for researchers working with historical criminal law materials.
Anderson's minimal definition adds the epistemological element — not brought about, not pre-estimated — which aligns with later doctrinal tests for foreseeability. Bouvier's redirect to ACCIDENT reflects the older view that the terms were functionally equivalent, a view the later Black's editions appear to be consciously correcting.
None of the historical dictionaries address chance as a probabilistic unit of damage, as probability theory in damages law is a twentieth-century development.