Definition
Falsi (also appearing as crimen falsi) is a Latin legal term referring to crimes involving falsification, fraud, or deceit — offenses that, at common law, rendered the person who committed them infamous and therefore incompetent to testify as a witness. The category encompasses acts of forgery, perjury, subornation of perjury, counterfeiting, and similar offenses grounded in dishonesty or deliberate falsification of fact or record.
The term is most often encountered in legal texts as part of the phrase crimen falsi, meaning "crime of falsification." Its core significance in Anglo-American law is not primarily the criminal penalty attached to such offenses, but the legal consequence of infamy: the disqualification of the convicted person from serving as a witness or, in some formulations, from holding certain offices or exercising civic functions.
Common Confusion
Falsi is frequently cited as though it were a standalone offense, but it is properly a category of offenses, not a single crime. The practical question in historical legal research is almost always whether a specific conviction falls within the crimen falsi category, which triggers infamy and its consequences. Researchers should also distinguish between the common law doctrine of infamy (which operated as an absolute bar to witness competency) and the modern evidentiary rule allowing prior convictions to be used for impeachment — a related but distinct legal mechanism. The two are historically connected but should not be treated as interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research significance of falsi is its role in the law of witness competency and impeachment. In the common law tradition, conviction of a crimen falsi rendered a person legally infamous and categorically incompetent to testify. This is a doctrine that appears across evidence treatises, trial records, and judicial opinions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and requires careful attention when reading historical sources.
Several navigational traps appear in the corpus:
First, the list of offenses classified as crimen falsi was never fully settled. Different authorities included or excluded particular crimes — some treatises limited the category to offenses involving falsification of records or documents; others extended it to any offense involving moral turpitude touching on honesty. Researchers cannot assume uniform classification across jurisdictions or time periods.
Second, the mechanism for establishing infamy in court was strict. As Bouvier records, only the record of conviction was sufficient — not an admission by the witness, not reputation evidence, not hearsay about a prior guilty plea. This evidentiary rule has direct implications for how courts dealt with witness challenges in historical trials and explains the procedural formalism surrounding offers of the record.
Third, the effect of pardon or reversal of sentence on infamy was treated as restorative in most authorities — the conviction being wiped away, competency was revived — but this restoration was not universal, and some jurisdictions carved out exceptions. Reading any historical source on this point requires attention to whether a pardon operated as full restoration or only as remission of penalty.
Fourth, the modern Federal Rules of Evidence (particularly Rule 609) codify a version of impeachment by prior conviction that descends from the crimen falsi doctrine, but the modern rule operates differently: it does not disqualify a witness entirely, it permits the prior conviction as impeachment evidence subject to balancing, and it uses the phrase "crime involving dishonesty or false statement" rather than crimen falsi. Researchers moving between historical and modern materials must track this shift carefully.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry, as preserved in the corpus, addresses falsi primarily through the lens of infamy and witness competency rather than as a substantive criminal classification. The surviving excerpt focuses on the evidentiary rules for establishing infamy: production of the conviction record is required; a witness's own admission of guilt is insufficient; English practice differed from American in permitting the witness to be asked directly about conviction. Bouvier further notes that pardon or reversal of sentence restores competency, with the implication that exceptions existed.
The entry's truncation in the corpus means it does not capture the full treatment of which specific offenses constituted crimen falsi, a gap researchers should flag. Other historical treatise sources — Greenleaf on Evidence, Starkie on Evidence, and Stephen's Digest of the Law of Evidence — provide more complete taxonomies of qualifying offenses and should be consulted alongside Bouvier for any serious historical inquiry into this category.
The English and American rules diverged meaningfully on the procedural question of how to surface a prior conviction at trial, and Bouvier acknowledges this divergence. Stephen's Evidence, Article 130, is cited as the English authority.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions historically required production of the record of conviction to establish infamy; English practice was more permissive, allowing direct questioning of the witness. Modern American jurisdictions have largely displaced the common law incompetency rule through codified evidence rules, but the crimen falsi category survives in Federal Rule of Evidence 609 and its state analogues, governing impeachment by conviction of crimes involving dishonesty or false statement.