Definition
Commandment carries two distinct legal meanings, both historically significant but rarely encountered in modern practice under this label.
1. In criminal law: The act or offense of one who commands, procures, or incites another person to transgress the law — particularly to commit a crime such as theft or murder. In this sense, commandment was the early common law term for what modern law treats as accessorial liability before the fact. The person who issued the commandment was treated as a principal participant in the crime, not merely an advisor or bystander.
2. In practice (procedural law): An act of authority by a magistrate or judge — a formal order directing that something be done, including the commitment of a person to prison. In this sense, commandment is essentially synonymous with a judicial mandate or precept, carrying the coercive authority of the court.
A third use appears in partnership law: commandite (société en commandite) describes a partnership form in which certain partners (partners in commandité) are passive contributors whose liability is limited to the capital they invested. This usage is French-derived commercial law vocabulary and is treated separately under COMMANDITE and PARTNERSHIP.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A divinely ordained command, especially one of the Ten Commandments; more generally, something that must be obeyed; a command or edict.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An order or injunction given by authority; a command, charge, precept, or mandate; one of the ten laws given by God to the Israelites at Mount Sinai; also, the act of commanding or exercising authority.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant in one direction: ordinary usage carries an almost exclusively religious or moral connotation — the Ten Commandments, divine instruction, moral obligation. The legal sense is strictly procedural and criminal. A researcher encountering commandment in a historical legal text should not read it as moral exhortation; it is a technical term describing either a mode of criminal liability or a judicial order carrying compulsive force.
Common Confusion
Commandment (criminal law sense) is frequently confused with — or collapsed into — the modern categories of solicitation, incitement, and accessorial liability. These are not identical. Commandment as used in Bracton and the early common law was broader in application and less precisely bounded than modern solicitation doctrine, which requires a specific mental state and often a completed communication to a specific person. Researchers working in historical criminal law materials should not assume that commandment maps cleanly onto any single modern offense category.
The term commandment should also be distinguished from commandeering, the constitutional doctrine prohibiting the federal government from conscripting state officials to administer federal law. The structural similarity of the words has no doctrinal relationship.
Why It Matters in Research
The criminal law meaning of commandment is the form most likely to appear in historical English and early American legal sources, and it requires careful translation when reading into modern doctrine. Bracton, Coke's Institutes, and early American criminal law treatises use commandment to describe what we now call procurement or accessorial liability before the fact. When researching the historical development of accomplice liability, conspiracy, or solicitation, commandment is a predecessor term that will appear in primary sources where modern researchers expect to find the word "solicitation" or "aiding and abetting."
The procedural meaning — a judicial act of authority — surfaces in older reports and writs where a court issues a commandment to a jailer or officer. Researchers navigating early writ practice, habeas corpus history, or commitment proceedings will encounter the term in this sense and should not confuse it with the criminal law definition.
The commandite partnership usage is a trap for the unwary in 19th-century commercial law research. Black's includes a passage on société en commandite immediately adjacent to its criminal law definition of commandment, and the proximity in some editions has caused researchers to conflate distinct entries. The commandite form survives in Louisiana law (reflecting its French civil law heritage) and in modern limited partnership structures, but under entirely different vocabulary.
Jurisdictional note: The commandite partnership form remains a live concept in Louisiana, where civil law influence preserved it. Elsewhere in the United States, it was absorbed into the statutory limited partnership framework during the 19th and 20th centuries and the term commandite is now archaic outside Louisiana practice and comparative law scholarship.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core criminal law definition: commandment is the act of one who commands or procures another to break the law. Black's and Burrill's both trace it explicitly to Bracton (fol. 138–139) and Coke's Institutes (2 Inst. 182), grounding the term firmly in medieval common law. Rapalje & Lawrence add the civilian parallel — mandatum — noting that civil law jurists used that term for the same concept, a useful bridge for researchers working across common law and civil law sources.
Burrill's adds a procedural definition absent or underemphasized in the other sources: commandment as a magistrate's act of committing a person to prison, citing Cowell's Interpreter. This definition is the most archaic and the least likely to appear in American sources, but it is important for researchers working in early English legal records or pre-Revolutionary colonial materials.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the relationship between commandment and modern accomplice liability doctrine. None of the sources works through the transition from commandment to the modern vocabulary of accessorial liability, leaving the researcher to bridge that gap independently. The Statute of Westminster I (c. 14), cited by Burrill's, is worth consulting for researchers tracing the statutory roots of the commandment offense.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Anti-Commandeering Doctrine — Federal Limits on Directing State Officials (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)
Commander-in-Chief Power and Military Authority (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)
Note: Neither encyclopedia entry addresses commandment in its criminal law or procedural sense. The cross-references are offered for researchers who arrive at this entry through constitutional law queries involving the structural concept of governmental commands to subordinate actors. The doctrinal connection is structural and etymological, not substantive.