Definition
Crimina extraordinaria (singular: crimen extraordinarium) is a Latin term from Roman law meaning, literally, "extraordinary crimes." It denotes a class of offenses that fell outside the jurisdiction of the standing courts (quaestiones perpetuae) established under the Roman Republic and were instead prosecuted through special or irregular procedures, typically before magistrates, the emperor, or the Senate. Because these crimes lacked a fixed statutory framework or permanent court, the mode of prosecution, the rules of evidence, and the penalties applicable were more flexible — and often more severe — than those governing ordinary criminal proceedings.
The category was not defined by a single statute but emerged as Roman law developed to address conduct that the older republican court system had not anticipated or adequately covered. Over time, crimina extraordinaria came to include a wide and heterogeneous list of offenses, among them: adultery and interference with the marital relations of others; attempts upon the chastity of another's wife; publicly defiling or besmearing another person with mud or filth; polluting public water supplies, pipes, or tanks to public injury; seducing a girl after abducting her companion; accosting women or girls or committing immodest acts against them; procuring abortion; cornering the market (monopolistic practices injurious to the public); and witchcraft or magical practices. The list was never closed or exhaustive.
Common Confusion
Crimina extraordinaria should not be confused with crimina publica (public crimes) or crimina privata (private wrongs). Crimina publica were tried before the standing quaestiones under specific statutes (leges) and carried fixed penalties; crimina extraordinaria arose precisely where those statutes did not reach. Nor should the term be conflated with modern notions of "extraordinary" as meaning severe or heinous — the Roman usage refers to the procedural category (outside ordinary courts), not to the gravity of the offense, though many offenses in this class were treated gravely in practice.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter crimina extraordinaria primarily in three contexts: Roman law scholarship and civil law history, comparative criminal law, and ecclesiastical or canon law sources that borrowed Roman classifications.
The term is procedurally diagnostic. When a historical source labels an offense as an extraordinary crime, it signals that the reader should look not to the standing statutory courts but to magisterial discretion, imperial rescripts, or senatorial process for the applicable rules. This matters enormously when tracing the development of offenses like abortion, market manipulation, or sexual misconduct through the civil law tradition into medieval and early modern legal systems.
The list of offenses that Roman jurists assigned to this category shifted over time and was never codified as a unified statute. Researchers relying on a single source — or a single period of Roman law — risk treating a snapshot as a complete picture. What appeared as extraordinary in the late Republic might be absorbed into a more regularized procedure by the classical period (first through third centuries CE) or the Justinianic compilations.
For comparative law research, crimina extraordinaria is a productive entry point into understanding how legal systems handle conduct that falls between established categories — the Roman problem of the numerus clausus of statutory offenses maps onto modern debates about over-criminalization and regulatory offenses. The market-cornering and water-pollution entries in the Roman list are particularly striking antecedents to modern economic and environmental criminal regulation.
Researchers working in canon law should note that ecclesiastical courts absorbed certain of these categories — particularly offenses involving sexuality, sorcery, and abortion — and processed them through their own procedural adaptations, sometimes retaining the Roman terminology while altering the substance.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary reproduces a representative (though incomplete) list of offenses falling within this category, including marital and sexual offenses, public nuisance-type harms (polluting water, cutting off water supply), market manipulation, and witchcraft. Bouvier presents the category descriptively rather than analytically, and the entry as preserved is truncated — the source material breaks off mid-list, suggesting the original entry contained additional examples.
What Bouvier does not do — and what no single-volume historical legal dictionary fully achieves — is situate the term within the procedural architecture of Roman law. The category only makes sense against the background of the quaestiones perpetuae and the iudicium publicum system, and researchers who encounter the term in Bouvier without that context may underestimate its significance. The Roman jurist Paulus and the Digest of Justinian (D. 47–48) are the primary juristic sources for understanding how this category functioned in classical Roman law, though the Digest itself is a sixth-century compilation that may not perfectly reflect earlier practice.
Historical common-law dictionaries generally do not carry this term, as it belongs to the civilian rather than the common-law tradition. Its appearance in Bouvier reflects that dictionary's sustained engagement with Roman and civil law foundations — an engagement that distinguishes Bouvier from strictly common-law references.
Jurisdictional Note
Crimina extraordinaria is a term of Roman law and has no direct counterpart in common-law jurisdictions. It retains analytical relevance in civil law systems (France, Italy, Spain, Louisiana, Quebec, and their legal descendants) where Roman law forms part of the jurisprudential background, and in ecclesiastical law scholarship. Researchers working in mixed jurisdictions should be alert to civilian sources using this classification.