Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "criminally." Used in legal texts and pleadings to signal that a matter is being pursued, characterized, or adjudicated in a criminal capacity — as distinguished from a civil one. The term appears most commonly in contrast with its paired opposite, civiliter ("civilly"), to mark the procedural and substantive register of a legal action or liability.
When a historical source states that a defendant is liable criminaliter, it means the person faces criminal prosecution — with attendant consequences of punishment, forfeiture, or penal sanction — rather than a civil suit for damages or equitable relief. The distinction was practically significant in older common law systems where the same wrongful act could give rise to both a criminal prosecution and a civil action, and courts or pleaders needed precise language to specify which proceeding was at issue.
Common Confusion
CRIMINALITER vs. CIVILITER: These two Latin terms function as a matched pair in historical legal writing. Criminaliter marks criminal liability or prosecution; civiliter marks civil liability or remedy. Researchers encountering one term in a historical source should expect the other nearby, often in the same sentence or clause. Confusing or ignoring the distinction can lead to fundamental misreading of whether a historical source is discussing punishment or damages, criminal procedure or civil pleading. The pair also appears in discussions of dual liability — situations where a single act (assault, fraud, defamation) exposes a party to both tracks simultaneously.
Why It Matters in Research
The term is almost entirely a historical artifact. Modern legal writing has no use for criminaliter; the concept it expresses — criminal as opposed to civil — is rendered in plain English or in modern procedural taxonomy. Researchers will encounter criminaliter almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century common law materials: Bracton, Year Books, early English reports, colonial American pleading, and treatises from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The primary research trap is misidentifying the word as describing a type of crime rather than a mode of proceeding. Criminaliter says nothing about what the underlying wrong is — it says only that the proceeding or liability is criminal in character. A text stating that a party "lies criminaliter" or "is answerable criminaliter" is making a procedural point, not a substantive one.
Rapalje & Lawrence's citation to Bracton (101b) is the canonical anchor. Bracton's use of criminaliter to distinguish criminal from civil accountability is foundational to understanding how medieval and early modern common lawyers conceptualized the dual-track liability system. Researchers working in that period should treat criminaliter as a structural signal — it indicates the author is sorting legal consequences by mode of enforcement.
Corpus connections: Entries for civiliter, actio, and delict will frequently appear in the same passages as criminaliter. Researchers tracing the development of tort law from criminal law will find the criminaliter/civiliter distinction a key analytical marker.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge cleanly on a single meaning: criminaliter means "criminally," in contrast to civiliter. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) gives the clearest synthesis, explicitly framing the term as definitionally dependent on its opposition to civiliter and tying it to the distinction between criminal liability and civil liability. The second edition adds the related term criminate — to charge with crime or furnish grounds for criminal prosecution — which is etymologically linked but functionally distinct.
Bouvier redirects to "criminal process," which is less precise but points researchers toward procedural materials. Rapalje & Lawrence is terse but valuable for its Bracton citation, grounding the term in its oldest and most authoritative common law usage. Burrill's entry appears truncated in surviving form, offering only the Latin origin notation.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: they do not discuss how the criminaliter/civiliter distinction operated in equity proceedings, nor do they note the term's gradual disappearance as pleading systems modernized in the nineteenth century. Researchers should not assume that any source using criminaliter post-dates its common usage period — the term persisted in learned legal writing long after it had left practical pleading.
Jurisdictional Note
Criminaliter is a term of English common law lineage and appears in American sources primarily in the colonial and early federal periods. It carries no jurisdiction-specific meaning variation; its content is definitional, not jurisdictional. Researchers in Scottish law, canon law, or civil law traditions may encounter the term in analogous but not identical contexts.