Definition
The condition of a person whose mental faculties are affected by the immediate consumption of intoxicating liquor. In a legal context, drunkenness is not a single fixed state but a spectrum of impairment, ranging from mild exhilaration to complete unconsciousness and insensibility. The law has addressed drunkenness across several distinct frameworks:
1. As a status offense or public offense: Being drunk in a public place or in circumstances defined by statute as unlawful, independent of any accompanying conduct.
2. As a defense or mitigating factor in criminal law: Voluntary intoxication may, in some jurisdictions and for some offenses, negate the specific intent required for conviction. Involuntary intoxication may operate as a complete defense analogous to insanity.
3. As a ground in civil and family law: Habitual drunkenness has historically appeared as a ground for divorce, a basis for challenging testamentary capacity, and a factor in competency determinations.
4. As a condition affecting contractual capacity: A person so intoxicated as to be incapable of understanding the nature of a transaction may have grounds to avoid a contract.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A state of being drunk.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The state of being drunken with, or as with, alcoholic liquor; intoxication; inebriety — used of the casual state or the habit. Also extended figuratively to disorder of the faculties resembling intoxication, as in passion described as "the drunkenness of the mind."
The common term and the legal term share a core meaning, but the gap lies in degree and function. Ordinary usage treats drunkenness as essentially self-evident and undifferentiated. Legal usage demands precision: whether the intoxication was voluntary or involuntary, whether it reached the threshold sufficient to negate intent or impair capacity, and whether it was a single episode or a habitual condition each carry distinct legal consequences. The legal question is never simply whether a person was drunk, but how drunk, in what circumstances, and to what legal effect.
Common Confusion
Drunkenness, intoxication, and habitual drunkenness are related but legally distinct. Intoxication is the broader clinical or legal term now generally preferred in modern statutes and case law, covering impairment by alcohol or other substances. Drunkenness historically referred specifically to alcohol. Habitual drunkenness is a term of art in older family law and competency contexts, requiring proof of a persistent pattern rather than a single episode — researchers must not treat isolated intoxication as evidence of habitual drunkenness for those purposes. Modern criminal codes largely use intoxication and may subdivide it into voluntary and involuntary categories that do not map neatly onto the older drunkenness framework.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in historical sources will find drunkenness operating as the primary term through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with intoxication gradually supplanting it in statutory language across the twentieth century. This shift is not merely cosmetic: older sources using drunkenness may import assumptions about alcohol specifically that do not carry forward into modern intoxication doctrine covering all mind-altering substances.
In criminal law research, the distinction between specific intent and general intent offenses is critical context for any historical discussion of drunkenness as a defense. Cases and treatises using drunkenness as a defense concept presuppose a specific intent framework that varies by jurisdiction and offense — applying those sources broadly is a common research trap.
In family law sources, habitual drunkenness as a divorce ground appears extensively in nineteenth and early twentieth century materials. Researchers should note that courts construed habitual drunkenness narrowly, requiring evidence of a fixed practice rather than occasional excess, and the standard varied considerably across states.
For contract and testamentary capacity questions, the threshold was not mere intoxication but incapacity to understand the nature of the act — a higher bar than mere drunkenness, and one that historical courts applied inconsistently.
The Bouvier's note that sobriety does not require total abstinence is a useful reminder that temperance-era legal sources operated in a contested cultural environment; researchers should not assume that period legal materials share modern clinical assumptions about impairment thresholds.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st ed.), Black's (2nd ed.), and Bouvier's converge on the same core medical jurisprudence definition: the condition of a person whose mind is affected by the immediate use of intoxicating drinks. Bouvier's is the most expansive, explicitly describing drunkenness as a spectrum ranging from exhilaration to complete insensibility, and noting the counterintuitive early-stage phenomenon in which mental operations may appear heightened rather than impaired. This spectrum observation carries genuine legal weight — it anticipates the modern problem of threshold determination and supports the argument that drunkenness alone, without proof of degree, is legally insufficient for most purposes.
Anderson's and Bouvier's cross-references to sobriety and temperance reflect the period's engagement with temperance reform and demonstrate that legal definitions of drunkenness were never purely clinical. The Bouvier's entry distinguishing popular from technical usage — popular usage reserving the term for manifest disturbance, technical usage covering the full range — is a useful caution for researchers reading historical opinions, where a judge's use of the word drunk or drunken may reflect colloquial rather than technical meaning.
What the historical dictionaries largely omit is any treatment of drunkenness as a criminal defense doctrine. That body of law developed through case law rather than dictionary definition, and researchers should not expect the dictionary entries to resolve the specific intent questions that dominate the field.
Jurisdictional Note
Drunkenness doctrine, particularly as a criminal defense, varies substantially across jurisdictions. Some states have abolished the voluntary intoxication defense by statute; others retain it for specific intent crimes only. The older divorce ground of habitual drunkenness has largely been superseded by no-fault divorce regimes, though it persists in some fault-based pleadings where available.