Definition
A person united with others in a wrongful or criminal design; an associate or confederate in wrongdoing. The term is functionally synonymous with accomplice, denoting one who participates in or assists with the commission of a crime or unlawful scheme alongside one or more other persons. In legal usage, complice carries no technical distinction from accomplice — it is an older variant rather than a term of art with independent meaning.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An accomplice; a supporter.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An accomplice. Marked as obsolete. Illustrated by Shakespeare: "To quell the rebels and their complices."
The gap between common and legal meaning is minimal, but the direction of obsolescence matters: in ordinary English, complice had already fallen out of use by the early twentieth century, while legal dictionaries continued carrying the term well into that same period. A researcher encountering complice in a legal document should treat it as a straightforward synonym for accomplice, not as a term carrying specialized criminal law weight.
Common Confusion
Complice and accomplice are not distinct legal concepts. Some researchers, encountering complice in older sources, assume it denotes a lesser degree of participation than accomplice — perhaps a confederate who did not directly participate in the act. The historical dictionaries do not support that distinction. Both terms are defined identically across sources, and no recognized gradation between them appears in the common law tradition. The confusion likely arises from the false analogy to French legal usage, where complice does carry technical meaning in the law of participation. In English and American legal sources, no such technical refinement applies.
Why It Matters in Research
Complice appears with some frequency in legal documents, pleadings, and judicial opinions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — particularly in criminal law contexts — and then drops away as accomplice became the dominant term. Researchers working in colonial-era records, early republic criminal proceedings, or older equity materials should recognize it immediately as a synonym for accomplice and follow the accomplice thread for substantive doctrine.
The term creates a minor indexing trap in corpus research: because complice is not the headword in most modern legal references, full-text searches for accomplice liability will miss passages that use complice exclusively. In Law Mind corpus work, both terms should be included in search strings when working across historical materials.
Bouvier's entry under this term is anomalous — the text reproduced under the complice heading in the available source material is actually the entry for INSTITOR, an entirely unrelated Latin civil law term concerning agents and store clerks. This appears to be a sourcing or transcription error and should not be treated as Bouvier's definition of complice. Researchers relying on that edition should verify the relevant page directly.
No meaningful jurisdictional variation exists for this term because it does not function as a term of art with independent doctrinal content in any American jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement: complice means one united with others in an ill design, and all three equate it directly with accomplice. There is no divergence among the sources on meaning, scope, or application. The consistency across these dictionaries over multiple decades reflects not active use of the term but rather the standard practice of carrying forward earlier headwords in successive editions.
Webster's 1913 is the most informative source here precisely because it marks the term obsolete — a signal the legal dictionaries do not provide. That the legal dictionaries continued listing complice after ordinary English had abandoned it illustrates the conservatism of legal lexicography, not ongoing legal usage. By the early twentieth century, complice was a historical artifact in both registers.
The Bouvier entry nominally attributed to this term is, as noted above, the INSTITOR entry and should be disregarded for purposes of defining complice.