Definition
In law, daylight has a technical meaning that extends beyond the ordinary sense of sunlight being present. It refers to the transitional periods of twilight — specifically the time before sunrise and the time after sunset — that are still counted as part of the "day" for purposes of defining burglary. Under the traditional common law of burglary, the offense required that the breaking and entering occur in the nighttime. Daylight, in this sense, marks the boundary of that nighttime window. The legal question was not whether the sun was above the horizon, but whether there was sufficient natural light by which a person's face could be discerned. The twilight periods before sunrise and after sunset, while not fully dark, were treated as falling outside the protected "night" for burglary purposes — meaning a breaking during those hours was in daylight, not night.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The natural ambient light present during daytime, derived from sunlight whether direct or indirect; also the period between sunrise and sunset.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The light of day as opposed to the darkness of night; the light of the sun as opposed to moonlight or artificial light.
The legal usage inverts the intuitive assumption. In ordinary speech, "daylight" means light that is visibly present — roughly, sunrise to sunset. In the burglary context, legal daylight includes the twilight zones before sunrise and after sunset, precisely because these are the hours that do not count as "night." The term is used negatively, so to speak: to establish what is not night, rather than to describe what is positively illuminated.
Common Confusion
Daylight in the burglary context is frequently conflated with the period of direct sunlight or with daytime as a whole. The operative legal test under common law was not astronomical but perceptual: whether there was enough natural light to recognize a person's countenance. This meant that deep dusk or early pre-dawn could still qualify as daylight if visibility was sufficient. Modern statutory burglary definitions in many jurisdictions have abandoned the day/night distinction altogether, making this technical meaning largely historical. Researchers should not assume the common law daylight/night distinction survives in modern statutes without verification.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary relevance of this term is confined to common law burglary analysis and to historical criminal law sources. Researchers working with pre-20th-century English and American criminal law materials will encounter "daylight" as a term of art in the burglary context and must understand it as defining the outer edge of "night" rather than as a synonym for daytime.
The historical sources are consistent and narrow: every dictionary entry ties daylight exclusively to the burglary offense, citing Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Comm. 224) and Croke's Jacobean reports (Cro. Jac. 106). Researchers following those citations will find the foundational common law treatment of how nighttime was defined for burglary. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry usefully cross-references "Days, computation of," signaling that questions about time measurement in law appear in adjacent entries — useful when researching limitation periods or statutory deadlines, though those inquiries use "days" in a wholly different sense.
Modern researchers should note that American jurisdictions have largely codified burglary without the nighttime element, or have made nighttime an aggravating factor rather than a definitional requirement. The legal meaning of daylight as a burglary boundary is therefore most relevant to: (1) historical case research under common law or early American statutes; (2) interpretation of older indictments or jury instructions; and (3) comparative common law scholarship. For modern criminal law research, confirm whether the applicable statute retains any day/night distinction before relying on this definition.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries — Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill's — give virtually identical definitions, all tracing to the same two citations: Blackstone and Croke Jacobi. This uniformity reflects a stable, settled common law term with no meaningful internal dispute among the historical lexicographers.
Burrill's is the most technically precise, providing the Latin law equivalent (diurnum lumen, crepusculum — meaning daily light, twilight) and cross-referencing both Burglary and Night as related entries. The Latin signals that this was a recognized term in the formal common law vocabulary, not merely a descriptive phrase.
Notably, none of the historical dictionaries engage with the perceptual test (visibility of a face) that underlies the doctrine — that formulation appears in the underlying common law cases and commentaries rather than the dictionary entries themselves. Researchers who stop at the dictionary definitions will have the boundary concept but may miss the evidentiary standard used to apply it. Black's (1st edition) entry also contains a partial fragment referencing DAY-RULE or DAY-WRIT — a distinct term concerning prisoner releases — indicating a typographical run-on in the source text that should not be read as part of the daylight definition.
Jurisdictional Note
The nighttime element of burglary, and with it the legal significance of daylight as its boundary, was part of English common law received across American jurisdictions. However, modern American burglary statutes vary significantly: some retain nighttime as an element or aggravating circumstance; many have eliminated it. English law has also substantially reformed its burglary offenses. The technical common law definition of daylight is most reliably applicable to pre-20th-century sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Burglary