Definition
"Crimes and offences against the law" is a historical phrase appearing in extradition treaties and instruments, used to describe the class of conduct that a surrendering state agrees to treat as an extraditable offense. The phrase does not identify a discrete crime but rather functions as a categorical descriptor within treaty language — a shorthand for offenses recognized as criminal by the legal systems of both the requesting and surrendering states.
In its operative context, the phrase raises the question of what counts as a "crime or offence against the law" for purposes of extradition — specifically, whether the conduct alleged must be criminal under the law of both countries (the principle of double criminality), or whether treaty language can be read more broadly. The phrase thus served as a threshold test: could the requesting state's characterization of conduct as criminal bind the surrendering state to extradite, or must the surrendering state independently satisfy itself that the conduct falls within its own legal understanding of criminal behavior?
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Common Confusion
"Crimes and offences against the law" is not a substantive offense category — it does not describe murder, theft, fraud, or any particular wrong. Researchers encountering the phrase in historical treaty materials may initially mistake it for a defined class of crimes (analogous to "crimes against the person" or "crimes against property"). It is instead procedural and definitional language going to the scope of extradition obligations. The phrase also should not be confused with "political offenses," which were frequently carved out of extradition treaties precisely because they were treated as outside the ordinary category of crimes and offenses against the law.
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Why It Matters in Research
The phrase is a navigational signal in historical extradition materials. When you encounter it, you are almost certainly reading treaty interpretation rather than substantive criminal law, and the real dispute is typically about double criminality or the political offense exception.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is conspicuously thin — it provides nothing beyond a citation to L.R. 5 P.C. 179, directing the researcher immediately to the Privy Council. That citation is the substance of the entry. This editorial choice reflects how Rapalje & Lawrence handled treaty-law phrases: rather than synthesizing doctrine, they pointed to the authoritative resolution. Researchers relying on the dictionary entry alone will miss the legal reasoning; the primary source is indispensable here.
The Law Reports reference (L.R. 5 P.C. 179) locates the case in the Law Reports, Privy Council Appeals series, volume 5. Privy Council decisions in extradition matters from this period carry weight across multiple common law jurisdictions simultaneously — the decision would have been understood as broadly persuasive or controlling throughout the British Empire's extradition framework. This makes the citation particularly significant for researchers working on comparative or colonial criminal law.
Researchers should be alert to the fact that the phrase "crimes and offences against the law" could appear in treaty texts drafted in English for non-English-speaking jurisdictions (as with China), where translation equivalents might not map cleanly onto either party's domestic criminal categories. This creates interpretive complexity that purely domestic criminal law dictionaries do not address and that historical legal dictionaries rarely flag.
The phrase has largely disappeared from modern extradition instruments, which tend to use either a list-based approach (enumerating specific extraditable offenses) or a threshold approach (defining extraditable offenses by reference to minimum sentencing). Researchers working backward from modern extradition law to historical treaty practice need to recognize that this older categorical language operated under different assumptions about how treaty obligations would be interpreted and enforced.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the only shelf source with a direct entry. That entry consists entirely of the parenthetical "(in extradition law)" followed by the citation "L. R. 5 P. C. 179" — no definition, no synthesis, no doctrinal explanation. This is one of the most minimal entries in the dictionary and reflects the approach the authors took with phrases whose meaning was considered fully determined by a single authoritative decision. The entry functions as a pure pointer rather than an analysis.
No other standard historical legal dictionaries — Bouvier, Black, or Burrill — appear to carry a discrete entry for this phrase, which reflects its character as treaty language rather than common law doctrine. The absence of broader dictionary treatment is itself informative: the phrase was not absorbed into general legal vocabulary because it had no life outside the specific context of treaty-based extradition.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase arose specifically in the context of extradition between Great Britain and China and was interpreted by the Privy Council, whose decisions applied across British imperial jurisdiction. Its significance is therefore concentrated in the history of Anglo-Chinese treaty relations and British imperial extradition practice rather than in any single domestic legal system.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Extradition
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Double Criminality
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Political Offense Exception
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