Definition
GRADE carries two distinct legal meanings that operate in entirely separate areas of law:
1. Physical grade (streets and highways): The line of inclination of a road or street from the horizontal — either the established reference line set by public authority to guide future construction, or the actual surface of the street as built to that line. A municipality's power to establish grade is treated as co-extensive with its obligation to maintain the street, meaning a government body that sets a grade assumes responsibility for consequences to abutting property.
2. Grade of crime (criminal law): The relative rank or severity of a criminal offense within a classification system, with higher grades carrying greater punishment and more serious legal consequences for the convicted party. Grade in this sense organizes offenses along a spectrum — from infractions through misdemeanors to felonies, or within felony classes from least to most serious — to calibrate proportional punishment.
A third, narrower usage appears in military and naval law: grade denotes a naval officer's classification by duty, title, or office, distinct from but related to rank.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A rating or score on an evaluation; a degree or level of quality; a slope of a roadway; a level of primary or secondary school.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A step or degree in any series, rank, quality, or order; relative position or standing; also, the rate of ascent or descent along a railroad or highway.
The common meaning of grade as a roadway slope aligns closely with legal usage in highway law — the difference is legal precision. In law, grade is not merely descriptive of a physical slope; it refers to an officially established line of inclination with binding legal consequences for adjacent property owners and municipal liability. A street "at grade" or "below grade" triggers specific rights and remedies that the common understanding of slope does not contemplate.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Established grade: The line formally set by governmental authority, often by ordinance, to govern future construction and improvement of a street. Once established, changes to grade may give rise to claims by abutting landowners for resulting damage to property.
Natural grade: The original, pre-improvement surface level of land before any artificial alteration. Relevant in determining whether a change in grade was government-imposed and thus potentially compensable.
Grade of offense: The classification of a crime by severity tier. In modern statutory codes, grades typically appear as classes (Class A felony, Class B misdemeanor, etc.) or degrees (first-degree, second-degree).
Why It Matters in Research
The double meaning of grade creates a significant indexing problem in older legal sources. A search on "grade" in street and highway materials will surface no criminal law content, and vice versa — but older digests and encyclopedias do not always segregate the two uses cleanly. Researchers working in municipal law should expect the physical-grade definition; researchers in criminal law should expect the offense-classification definition.
In street and highway research, the critical legal event is the official establishment of grade, not mere physical construction. Pre-establishment cases involving natural or informal grades are treated differently than post-establishment cases, and the liability framework shifts accordingly. Bouvier's distinction — between the established reference line and the street as actually built to that line — is analytically important: a municipality may have set a grade without having yet graded the street, or may have graded the street without a formally adopted grade line, and these situations generate different legal outcomes.
In criminal law research, grade is often used interchangeably with degree and class across different jurisdictions and time periods. Nineteenth-century sources use grade almost exclusively; modern statutory codes heavily favor degree and class. A researcher tracing a criminal offense through historical sources must track all three terms to avoid missing relevant authority. Grade also interacts with the concept of lesser included offense: a lower grade of the same crime may be a lesser included offense of the higher grade, which has procedural consequences at trial and on appeal.
The military and naval usage of grade and rank appears primarily in federal materials and court-martial records. The Anderson entry notes that naval officers are classified according to duty or title (grade) separately from rank — a distinction that surfaces in pay disputes, precedence questions, and courts-martial jurisdiction issues.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Anderson agree on the core physical meaning: grade is the line of a street's inclination, and it exists in two senses — as a planned reference line and as a constructed surface. Bouvier explicitly cites Arkansas authority for the dual sense, making clear this was a live interpretive issue in the courts, not merely an abstract distinction.
Both dictionaries also treat grades of crime as a recognized term of art, with Anderson and Bouvier agreeing that grades are understood as higher or lower according to punishment and consequences to the convicted person. Neither source provides a comprehensive taxonomy of grade levels, because those taxonomies were (and remain) jurisdiction-specific.
Webster's 1913 confirms that the roadway meaning of grade was already fully embedded in general English usage by the late nineteenth century, which means legal and common usage were developing in parallel — a researcher cannot assume that a non-legal source using "grade" in a highway context was unaware of its legal implications.
What the historical dictionaries miss: Neither Anderson nor Bouvier addresses the constitutional dimension of grade changes — the question of whether a government-ordered change in street grade constitutes a taking or damaging of property requiring compensation. That question, heavily litigated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, must be pursued through case law and treatises rather than the dictionary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Compensation for changes in street grade varies significantly by jurisdiction. Some states treat a substantial change in established grade as a compensable taking or damaging of abutting property; others require the property owner to show special damages beyond those suffered by the general public. In criminal law, the labeling system for offense grades (class, degree, level) is almost entirely a matter of state statutory design, with no uniform federal model for state offenses.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Streets and Highways (established grade, liability for grade changes, municipal authority)
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Criminal Law Classification (grades and degrees of offense, lesser included offenses)