Definition
The dead body of a human being. In law, a corpse is the physical remains of a human person following death, and its treatment, disposition, and protection are governed by a distinct body of criminal, tort, and regulatory law.
The legal concept of a corpse is deceptively simple — the term requires little elaboration beyond its plain meaning — but its legal significance extends well beyond the definition itself. At common law, a corpse was not property in the traditional sense; it could not be owned, bought, or sold. Yet courts recognized duties with respect to its handling, and interference with a corpse gave rise to both criminal liability and civil claims.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In contemporary theatrical slang, "to corpse" means to laugh uncontrollably during a performance, or to cause another actor to do the same. The noun sense in general modern use refers to a dead human body.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's records "corpse" as referring to a dead human body, with an older and now obsolete usage encompassing a human body whether living or dead — the narrowing to the dead body sense had already occurred by the nineteenth century.
The legal meaning is entirely consistent with the noun's common meaning: a dead human body. The theatrical verb usage and the archaic living-body sense have no legal relevance. The significance lies not in any gap between common and legal meaning, but in recognizing that the legal consequences attached to a corpse — duties of burial, criminal protection against interference, and the no-property rule — are invisible in everyday usage and must be drawn from legal sources.
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Why It Matters in Research
Several research traps cluster around this term.
First, the no-property rule matters for understanding historical pleading and charging decisions. Because a corpse was not legally property at common law, stealing or disturbing a corpse could not be prosecuted as larceny. Bouvier flags this directly: stealing a corpse is an indictable offense as a common law crime (typically framed as an offense against public decency or against the right of burial), but not larceny. Researchers reviewing historical indictments must look for the specific charge form used — not theft, but desecration, unlawful disinterment, or similar framings.
Second, Black's Law Dictionary (1st edition) contains a corrupted entry — the definition reads in part "the dead body of a human body of the canon law. A compilation of the being," which is clearly a typographical or editorial corruption, possibly a conflation with the entry for CORPUS JURIS. Researchers using digitized versions of early Black's must treat that entry with caution and cross-check against the clean 2nd edition text.
Third, Anderson's Dictionary of Law offers no substantive definition and redirects entirely to BURIAL — a useful navigational signal that the legal doctrine of the period organized the subject under burial rights rather than under the corpse itself. Researchers working in late nineteenth-century sources should follow that cross-reference rather than expecting doctrine to appear under this heading.
Fourth, the law of corpses connects to several distinct doctrinal areas that researchers may need to traverse separately: the duty to bury (quasi-property rights held by next of kin), criminal statutes on disinterment and abuse of a corpse, tort claims for negligent mishandling of remains (a distinct emotional distress framework), and public health regulation of disposition. These areas developed on different timelines and may appear under different headings across encyclopedia and digest systems.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the core definition without disagreement: a corpse is the dead body of a human being. Bouvier provides the most substantive treatment, noting both the offense of stealing a corpse and the limitation that such conduct does not constitute larceny at common law — a distinction that reflects the no-property rule and was practically significant for prosecutors and pleaders.
Bouvier's citation string (Coke's Third Institute, Russell on Crimes, and American cases including an 1884 Albany Law Journal reference) points toward a well-developed common law discussion by the mid-nineteenth century, though the doctrine was not settled uniformly.
Anderson's cross-reference to BURIAL reflects an editorial judgment that the law organized itself around the obligation and right to bury, not around the corpse as an object. This is historically accurate: early common law doctrine focused on who had the right and duty of interment (church, family, coroner), rather than on abstract rights in the body itself.
The corrupted Black's 1st edition entry should be noted but not used. The 2nd edition corrects to the standard definition.
What the historical dictionaries largely miss is the emerging quasi-property doctrine — the idea that next of kin hold a possessory right in a corpse sufficient to maintain a civil action for interference — which developed substantially in American courts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is not reflected in these dictionary treatments.
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Jurisdictional Note
Modern statutory treatment of corpses — including criminal offenses for abuse of a corpse, disinterment, and unlawful disposition of remains — varies significantly by state. The common law no-property rule has been modified or supplemented by statute in many jurisdictions, and some states have enacted explicit quasi-property frameworks by legislation. Federal law intersects primarily through public health, transportation of remains, and Native American burial protections (NAGPRA).
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Death, Burial and the Law; Property Rights in Human Remains; Offenses Against the Dead.
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