Definition
In Scots law, a writ or summons issued by the Lord Advocate or his deputies to commence a criminal prosecution. Criminal letters formally notified the accused of the charges against them and required appearance before the court on a specified day to answer and stand trial. The instrument functioned as the initiating process of a criminal proceeding under Scots criminal procedure — roughly analogous in purpose to a criminal information at common law, though distinct in form and origin.
Criminal letters were not an indictment. They were a prosecutorial summons: a mechanism for bringing the accused before the court rather than a formal presentment by a grand jury or similar body. The Lord Advocate, as Scotland's chief public prosecutor, held authority to issue them directly, reflecting the structure of Scots criminal law in which public prosecution was centralized rather than jury-originated.
Common Confusion
Researchers encountering this term should not conflate criminal letters with an indictment. All four historical dictionaries are consistent on this point: the instrument resembles a criminal information at common law, not a bill of indictment. An indictment originates with a grand jury; criminal letters issued from the Lord Advocate's office as an executive prosecutorial act. The practical effect — initiating criminal proceedings against a named accused — is similar, but the procedural source and legal character are distinct. Researchers working with Scots criminal records or comparative criminal procedure literature should keep this distinction sharp.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a jurisdictional specialist. It appears almost exclusively in the context of Scots law and Scots legal procedure, and will surface in Law Mind corpus materials dealing with Scottish courts, comparative criminal procedure, or British legal history prior to significant procedural reforms. Researchers working in English common law sources will rarely encounter it, and when they do, it is typically in comparative or explanatory passages drawing a contrast between Scots and English criminal process.
The key navigational point: criminal letters belong to a procedural world organized around the Lord Advocate's prosecutorial monopoly rather than grand jury presentment. Sources that discuss criminal letters are implicitly sources about Scots criminal procedure, not English or American procedure. A researcher who encounters the term in a treatise without that context may misread the procedural framework being described.
Burrill's citation to Alison's Practice (2 Alison's Pr. 217) is the most useful pointer to primary authority. Archibald Alison's Principles and Practice of the Criminal Law of Scotland (1833) is a foundational treatise on Scots criminal procedure and the natural starting point for deeper research into the procedural context surrounding criminal letters.
The term is historically bounded. Scots criminal procedure underwent substantial reform during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and criminal letters as a distinct initiating instrument gave way to more modernized forms of prosecution. Researchers using this term as a search key in historical corpus materials should expect to find it primarily in pre-reform sources and in treatises written before or during the reform era.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the essential character of criminal letters: a Scots law prosecutorial writ issued by the Lord Advocate to commence criminal proceedings by summoning the accused to trial. There is no meaningful divergence on the core definition.
The dictionaries converge equally on the comparison to common law. Black's and Bouvier both describe criminal letters as resembling a criminal information at common law. Rapalje & Lawrence and Burrill frame the term more purely in procedural terms — a writ summoning the accused to appear on a named day — without the comparative gloss. Neither framing is wrong; they reflect different emphases rather than disagreement.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is procedural depth: how criminal letters related to other initiating instruments in Scots practice, what followed their issuance, or how the Lord Advocate's authority to issue them was understood constitutionally within Scots and later British law. Burrill's pointer to Alison fills part of that gap. Researchers needing more should treat the dictionary entries as orientation, not destination.
Jurisdictional Note
Criminal letters are a term of Scots law exclusively. They have no direct counterpart in English common law or American law, though all dictionaries note the functional resemblance to a criminal information. Researchers working in English or American sources who encounter this term are reading a comparative reference, not a description of applicable procedure.