Definition
To run away from a place, person, or situation in order to escape danger, apprehension, or harm. In legal contexts, "flee" appears most prominently in two settings: (1) criminal law, where flight from the scene of a crime or from law enforcement may be treated as circumstantial evidence of consciousness of guilt; and (2) self-defense and homicide law, where the obligation — or absence of obligation — to flee before using deadly force defines the boundary between justified and unjustified killing.
The term itself carries no single statutory definition; its legal significance is almost entirely contextual and doctrine-dependent.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To run away; to escape. To disappear quickly; to vanish.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To run away, as from danger or evil; to avoid in an alarmed or cowardly manner; to hasten off.
The common and legal meanings of "flee" are essentially the same in ordinary sense. The gap lies not in the word itself but in its legal consequences. In criminal and tort doctrine, the act of fleeing is freighted with significance — it can constitute evidence of guilt, trigger use-of-force doctrines, or determine whether a homicide is excused. Researchers should understand that the legal weight of the word is procedural and doctrinal, not definitional.
Common Confusion
"Flee" is sometimes used interchangeably with "escape" and "flight" in legal sources, but the terms carry different freight in different doctrinal contexts. "Flight" is the more common term of art in evidence law (consciousness of guilt; flight instructions to juries). "Escape" has a distinct criminal meaning — the offense of unlawfully departing from lawful custody. "Flee" most often appears in the self-defense context (flee to the wall; duty to retreat) and in statutes criminalizing flight from law enforcement. Researchers consulting older sources should confirm which doctrine is actually in view.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Flee to the wall: A historical common law formulation expressing the duty to retreat. Before resorting to deadly force in self-defense, a person who was assailed was required to retreat as far as safely possible — "to the wall," meaning until further retreat was physically impossible — before the law would excuse a killing. The doctrine reflects the common law's preference for avoidance over lethal response.
Fleeing felon: A distinct doctrine governing use of deadly force by law enforcement against a fleeing suspect. Under common law, officers could use deadly force to prevent the escape of a fleeing felon. Constitutional doctrine has substantially narrowed this rule.
Why It Matters in Research
The word "flee" is a gateway to two largely separate bodies of doctrine, and conflating them will send a researcher in the wrong direction.
In self-defense research, "flee to the wall" and the duty to retreat are the operative concepts. Older sources — including Anderson's entry here — treat flee primarily in this context. The common law duty to retreat has been substantially eroded in many American jurisdictions by stand-your-ground statutes, so a researcher relying on pre-twentieth-century dictionary entries or treatises will encounter a legal landscape that no longer reflects majority American practice. The historical sources are accurate to their period but require updating.
In criminal procedure and evidence research, flight is the operative concept. Jury instructions on "consciousness of guilt" often use the language of flight rather than flee. Researchers looking for evidentiary treatment of a defendant's departure from a crime scene should pivot to FLIGHT, not FLEE, as the search term in case law and secondary sources.
In law enforcement and Fourth Amendment research, the fleeing felon doctrine is the operative framework. The constitutional constraints on use of force against fleeing suspects developed largely in the late twentieth century and will not appear in any of the historical dictionary sources in the Law Mind corpus. Researchers must move to constitutional case law for current doctrine.
Anderson's cross-reference to FUGITIVE is useful but incomplete for modern research purposes. A fugitive, in the formal sense, is a person who has fled from justice and is subject to extradition or rendition. The term "flee" in the self-defense context describes a different legal moment — the split-second obligation to withdraw before force is used — and the two concepts should not be merged in research.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law dispenses with a standalone entry and redirects to FUGITIVE, while defining "flee to the wall" as the substantive doctrinal content worth recording. This choice reflects the common law's primary preoccupation with the self-defense context when the word appears in legal argument. Anderson's formulation — that the slayer must have had "no other possible (or at least probable) means of escaping" — captures the traditional retreat requirement accurately, though it does not address the emerging American modifications even within the late nineteenth-century period of compilation.
What Anderson's misses, as with most historical dictionaries in this corpus, is any treatment of the evidentiary significance of flight or the law enforcement use-of-force dimension. Those doctrines either developed later or were treated as belonging to different entries (EVIDENCE, ARREST). Researchers should treat Anderson's "flee to the wall" entry as historically reliable for the retreat doctrine and largely silent on everything else the word now implicates.
Jurisdictional Note
The duty to retreat — the legal obligation to flee before using deadly force — varies sharply by jurisdiction. A majority of American states have enacted stand-your-ground statutes eliminating or limiting the retreat requirement in places where a person has a lawful right to be. The traditional common law duty to retreat survives in a minority of states, primarily in the Northeast. The castle doctrine, recognized nearly universally, has always exempted persons from the duty to retreat within their own home. Researchers must identify the controlling jurisdiction before applying any historical statement of the retreat requirement.