Definition
A delict is a civil law concept describing a wrongful act — whether intentional, negligent, or in some formulations accidental — that causes harm to another person and gives rise to an obligation of reparation. The term derives from Roman law and remains the operative framework for private wrongs in civilian legal systems (France, Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, South Africa, and others) in the same way that tort functions in common law systems.
Two distinct senses operate in legal usage:
1. Private delict: A wrongful act causing damage to an individual, creating a personal obligation between the wrongdoer and the injured party. This is the primary civilian analog to common law tort. Unlike tort, however, delict in its classical civilian form is anchored to a general principle of liability for fault (culpa) rather than a collection of named wrongs.
2. Public or quasi-public delict: In Roman law and some later civilian systems, delict also encompassed wrongs whose consequences extended beyond the immediate victim to affect public order or security — a category broader than the modern private law of obligations but narrower than what common law would call criminal law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A wrongful act analogous to a tort in common law; also the branch of law dealing with such acts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An offense or transgression against law; in Scots law, an offense of a lesser degree, a misdemeanor.
Editorial note: The ordinary English usage tracks the legal meaning more closely than most borrowed Latin terms, but two gaps matter. First, common usage treats delict as simply a synonym for tort; the legal meaning carries specific civilian-system architecture (general fault principle, actio in factum, etc.) that tort does not share. Second, Webster's 1913 foregrounds the Scots criminal law sense — minor misdemeanor — which is a narrower and historically receding meaning that researchers can mistake for the dominant civil-obligations sense.
Common Confusion
DELICT vs. TORT: These terms are frequently treated as interchangeable, but the equivalence is rough. Tort is a common law concept built around discrete named wrongs (negligence, trespass, nuisance, etc.). Delict in civilian systems rests on a general clause imposing liability for any fault-caused harm, without requiring the plaintiff to fit the facts into a named category. The structural difference matters when reading comparative law materials or sources from mixed jurisdictions.
DELICT vs. QUASI-DELICT: In Roman law and its successors, a quasi-delict (quasi-delictum) covered harms arising without intentional wrongdoing — closer to what modern law calls strict or vicarious liability. The distinction has eroded in most modern civilian codes but appears persistently in historical sources and Louisiana jurisprudence.
DELICT vs. CRIME: In Scots law, historical sources use delict to mean a lesser public offense (roughly, misdemeanor), not a private civil wrong. This sense is largely obsolete outside Scottish institutional writing but surfaces in Burrill and earlier dictionaries in ways that can mislead a researcher approaching the term from a civil obligations context.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Private delict: Harm to an individual giving rise to a personal obligation of repair. The core of civilian delictual liability.
Public delict: Harm whose effects extend to the community or public order; historically actionable by any citizen, not only the direct victim.
Quasi-delict (quasi-delictum): In Roman law, liability arising from certain recognized situations without requiring intentional fault — the unjust enrichment or strict liability adjacent category. Preserved in Louisiana Civil Code terminology.
Scots delict: The general body of Scottish private law governing civil wrongs, functionally parallel to English tort law but operating under civilian principles inherited through the ius commune.
Why It Matters in Research
Jurisdictional bifurcation is the central research trap. Sources using delict written before 1900 may be operating in the Scots criminal-law sense (minor offense) rather than the civil-obligations sense. Context — institutional treatise vs. obligations commentary — is the key disambiguation signal. Erskine's Institutes, cited by Burrill, exemplifies the Scots criminal usage; Pothier and the Louisiana civilian tradition exemplify the obligations usage. Researchers should not assume continuity of meaning across these bodies of literature.
Louisiana is the primary American jurisdiction where delict appears as operative legal vocabulary, not just comparative context. Louisiana Civil Code articles on delictual responsibility (particularly the general fault article) are the domestic corpus entry point. Researchers working in Louisiana tort/obligations law who encounter the term in older sources must be alert to the pre-1984 Civil Code revision vocabulary, which used quasi-delict in ways the post-revision code has partially restructured.
Mixed jurisdictions — Scotland, South Africa, Quebec — use delict as the working term for all private law of civil wrongs. South African delict scholarship (Aquilian liability) and Scottish delict have developed substantial bodies of doctrine that diverge from both Roman sources and French-derived civilian systems. These distinctions matter when tracing comparative sources in the Law Mind corpus.
The term appears in international and comparative law materials with increasing frequency as courts in common law jurisdictions engage with civilian concepts. Researchers should flag that delict in a European Court of Justice or European private law context carries a specific technical meaning shaped by the Rome II Regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations — a modern layer entirely absent from the historical dictionaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the basic meaning — a wrongful act causing harm, derived from Roman law — but diverge instructively on scope and emphasis.
Black's (1st ed.) offers the most analytically useful entry, expressly noting that delict is wider than tort in both directions: it can shade into public law (wrongs against peace and security) on one end and include accidental harms without evil intention on the other. This observation about bidirectional breadth is not replicated in the other sources and is genuinely clarifying for comparative research.
Bouvier and Anderson agree that in its enlarged sense delict encompasses all crimes and misdemeanors, including injuries caused accidentally and without evil intention, but that common usage restricts it to lesser offenses punishable by small fines or short imprisonment. This restriction reflects the Scots and Roman criminal law usage and should not be read as defining the civil obligations meaning.
Burrill focuses almost exclusively on the Scots criminal law sense — delict as roughly equivalent to English misdemeanor — citing Erskine's Institutes. This is the most narrowly focused entry and the most likely to mislead a researcher seeking the civil obligations meaning.
Rapalje & Lawrence gives the briefest entry, defining delict as the action of one doing damage or evil involuntarily — a formulation that captures the quasi-delict or accidental harm dimension but understates the intentional wrongdoing at the core of classical delict.
None of the historical dictionaries fully address the modern civilian doctrine as it has developed in Louisiana, Scotland, or South Africa, and none anticipate the comparative private law usage now standard in transnational legal scholarship. Researchers relying solely on these sources for doctrine (as opposed to definition) will need to supplement with civilian treatises and modern codes.
Jurisdictional Note
Delict is the operative term for civil wrongs in Scotland, South Africa, Quebec, and Louisiana. In Scotland and South Africa, delict doctrine has developed substantial indigenous bodies of case law and scholarship diverging from French-derived civilian systems. Louisiana uses both delict and quasi-delict as statutory terms of art in the Civil Code, though the post-1984 revision restructured some of the traditional categories. In purely common law U.S. jurisdictions, the term appears almost exclusively in comparative or conflict-of-laws contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Civil Law Obligations
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Tort and Delict Compared
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Louisiana Private Law