Definition
A French legal term meaning fraud, swindling, or cheating. In its original civil law context, escroquerie denotes the obtaining of property or money from another by deceptive means — the essential act of a fraudulent taking accomplished through misrepresentation or false pretense rather than by force or open theft. The term appears in Anglo-American legal sources primarily as a borrowed term from French law, used by treatise writers and courts when discussing continental criminal or civil classifications of dishonest acquisition. It is not a term of art in common law jurisdictions but surfaces in comparative law contexts, conflict of laws discussions, and older legal dictionaries as a shorthand for the French law concept equivalent to common law fraud or obtaining by false pretenses.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general English circulation; used in French to mean swindling or fraud.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded as an English entry; recognized as a French-origin word for swindling.
The gap between the borrowed term and its legal context is narrow in one sense — escroquerie means in French law roughly what it says — but the risk for researchers is in the other direction: assuming the French legal concept maps cleanly onto common law categories of fraud, larceny by trick, or false pretenses. It does not. French escroquerie is a distinct offense with its own doctrinal elements under the French Penal Code, and its appearance in an English-language legal source signals a civil law reference point, not a common law one.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering escroquerie in historical Anglo-American legal sources should treat it as a signal rather than a definition. Its presence almost always indicates one of the following: a comparative law discussion contrasting English and French criminal or commercial law; a conflict of laws question involving a transaction in France or a French-speaking jurisdiction; or a treatise writer reaching for a continental term to illuminate a common law concept.
In corpus research, the term clusters with discussions of dol (French for fraud or deceit), stellionat, and related civil law fraud terminology. Its use is sparse in common law digests and unreported in most American case law. Researchers using historical dictionaries will find the entries brief — both Black's editions give little more than a gloss — and should not expect substantive doctrinal content from those sources alone.
The primary trap is anachronism. A researcher finding escroquerie in a 19th-century American or English legal text should not assume the author is invoking contemporary French statutory law; they are more likely using it in the looser sense of "swindling" as a descriptive term, drawing on French legal vocabulary for rhetorical precision.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions are in agreement and are essentially identical: escroquerie is glossed as "fraud, swindling, cheating" with the French attribution. Neither edition provides doctrinal elaboration, case support, or comparative analysis. The entries function as vocabulary notes rather than substantive legal definitions — appropriate for a borrowed term that never became naturalized into common law doctrine.
What the historical dictionaries omit is any indication of the specific elements of escroquerie as a French legal offense (involving deceit, a resulting transfer of property, and prejudice to the victim), and any guidance on how its meaning differs from adjacent civil law concepts like dol or abus de confiance. Researchers seeking that level of detail must go beyond English-language legal dictionaries to French legal sources or comparative criminal law scholarship.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Escroquerie has no operative legal meaning in common law jurisdictions. In French law and jurisdictions that derive their criminal codes from the French model, it is a defined criminal offense. Researchers encountering the term in an American or English legal context should treat it as comparative or descriptive vocabulary, not as a term carrying technical domestic legal weight.
---