Definition
Felo de se (Latin: "felon of himself") is the common law designation for a person who commits suicide or who dies as the direct result of their own unlawful or malicious act. The classification treated self-killing as a felony against the Crown — not merely a moral or religious transgression, but a criminal act with legal consequences.
The doctrine encompassed two situations: (1) deliberate self-destruction, where a person intentionally ends their own life; and (2) constructive self-killing, where a person engaged in an unlawful or malicious act dies as its consequence — for example, a person who, attempting to kill another, runs onto the other's sword, or whose weapon misfires and kills them instead.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "A crime committed against oneself, in particular suicide."
Historical common usage: The phrase has no independent entry in Webster's 1913, reflecting its status as a term of art absorbed into legal rather than popular vocabulary.
The Wiktionary definition is essentially accurate but strips away the doctrinal weight. At common law, felo de se was not simply a label for suicide — it was a formal legal verdict with severe downstream consequences including forfeiture of property to the Crown and denial of Christian burial. The "crime" framing matters: it explains why the classification generated legal proceedings, jury verdicts, and estate consequences, not merely pastoral or moral censure.
Common Confusion
Felo de se is sometimes conflated with non compos mentis, the finding that a decedent lacked mental capacity at the time of self-killing. The two are mutually exclusive: a verdict of non compos mentis exempted the decedent from the felo de se classification and shielded the estate from forfeiture. Coroner's juries historically faced pressure to return non compos mentis findings precisely to protect surviving families from the harsher legal consequences of a formal felo de se verdict. Researchers should not treat the two terms as synonymous or as degrees of the same finding.
Why It Matters in Research
This term follows the historical evolution pattern. Its legal significance is almost entirely historical — felo de se as an operative legal classification is extinct in American and English law — but it appears frequently across several categories of sources researchers encounter in the Law Mind corpus.
Forfeiture consequences. At common law, a felo de se verdict triggered forfeiture of the decedent's goods and chattels to the Crown. This consequence drove a great deal of the legal activity around the term and explains why it appears in probate, estate, and property records. American jurisdictions largely rejected Crown forfeiture at independence, and most states abolished any remaining legal penalties for suicide by statute in the nineteenth century. A source citing felo de se in an American context after roughly 1850 is likely discussing the doctrine historically, litigating an insurance policy exclusion, or addressing a narrow surviving consequence — not a criminal proceeding.
Insurance law crossover. The term migrates prominently into insurance law, where policy exclusions for "self-destruction" or "felo de se" generated substantial litigation throughout the nineteenth century. Courts split on whether an insured's suicide voided a life insurance policy, and on whether the felo de se framing required proof of criminal intent. Researchers using the term as a search string in insurance cases will find a distinct and voluminous body of authority largely disconnected from the criminal law origins.
Coroner's inquest records. Felo de se verdicts were formally rendered by coroner's juries, making the term a marker in inquest records rather than court records. Researchers using historical primary sources should look for the term in coroner's rolls and inquest returns, not indictment files.
Spelling and abbreviation variation. Historical sources render the term inconsistently: felo de se, felo-de-se, and the Law French cognate felon de luy mesme all appear. Burrill's records the Law French form explicitly. Search strategies in digitized historical collections should account for these variants.
Historical Dictionary Support
The five shelf sources converge on the core definition without meaningful divergence: one who deliberately ends their own life, or who dies as a consequence of their own unlawful and malicious act. Burrill's is the most expansive, providing the Law French parallel (felon de luy mesme), citing Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown, and offering concrete illustrative examples of the constructive self-killing doctrine. Black's (both editions) and Anderson's align closely on text. Bouvier's is the most economical, cross-referencing SUICIDE without elaboration.
What the historical dictionaries understate: none of the shelf sources adequately develops the forfeiture consequences or the coroner's inquest procedure, both of which were central to how the doctrine functioned in practice. Researchers relying solely on dictionary definitions will miss the procedural and property-law dimensions that gave the classification its real-world force. Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown (book 1, chapter 27), cited in Burrill's, remains the foundational common law treatment and is worth consulting directly for the doctrine's operational mechanics.
The shelf sources also do not address the American abolition story. By the mid-nineteenth century the term was becoming vestigial in American law, surviving mainly in insurance litigation. The dictionaries, several of which date from that transitional period, present the doctrine in its common law form without flagging its declining operative significance.
Jurisdictional Note
England abolished felo de se as a criminal verdict by the Suicide Act 1961. American jurisdictions varied in their treatment but generally declined to carry forward Crown forfeiture, and most states either never recognized criminal penalties for suicide or eliminated them by statute well before the twentieth century. The term retains practical relevance today almost exclusively in the interpretation of older insurance policy exclusions and in historical legal research.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Suicide (Legal History); Coroner's Inquest; Life Insurance Policy Exclusions.