Definition
In legal usage, hunger refers to the physiological state of food deprivation, arising principally in two contexts: (1) as a proposed excuse or justification for theft, which courts and authorities have consistently rejected, and (2) as a cause or contributing factor in death, relevant to homicide, neglect, and related inquiries. The term carries no special legal definition distinct from its ordinary meaning, but its legal significance lies entirely in how doctrine treats it — and that treatment is unambiguous: hunger does not excuse criminal conduct.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To be in need of food; to have a strong desire or yearning; to make hungry or famish.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An uneasy sensation occasioned normally by the want of food; a craving or desire for food; by extension, any strong eager desire.
The gap between common and legal meaning is not definitional but consequential. In ordinary language, hunger implies urgency and involuntary need — conditions that intuitively suggest sympathy or mitigation. In law, that intuitive pull is precisely what the doctrine addresses and forecloses. The legal treatment of hunger is a deliberate refusal to convert physiological necessity into legal excuse, regardless of how compelling the need may be in fact.
Common Confusion
Hunger is sometimes loosely invoked as a form of the necessity defense — the argument that a defendant committed an unlawful act to prevent a greater harm. The two are related but not identical. The necessity defense is a formal doctrine with recognized elements, and most jurisdictions apply it narrowly. Hunger-as-necessity arguments have historically failed because courts require imminence, lack of legal alternatives, and proportionality that theft claims typically cannot satisfy. Researchers should not assume that citations to hunger in older sources are engaging with necessity doctrine as such; the authorities pre-date the doctrine's modern formulation.
Why It Matters in Research
This term matters less as a substantive legal concept and more as a doctrinal marker. When Bouvier, Hale, and Blackstone address hunger, they are drawing a firm line against a class of arguments that must have had real-world traction — defendants did raise hunger as a defense, and the treatise writers found it necessary to rebut it directly. That context tells researchers something important: historical larceny doctrine was not unaware of poverty as a circumstance; it affirmatively declined to treat it as an excuse.
For researchers working in criminal law history, poor law, or the intersection of social conditions and doctrine, hunger appears at a junction between legal formalism and social reality. The legal record is largely silent on the human circumstances behind individual prosecutions, but the treatise dismissals of hunger as excuse are themselves evidence of the conditions defendants faced.
Researchers examining death cases should note that hunger as a cause of death implicates entirely different bodies of doctrine — homicide by omission, neglect, parental duty, institutional liability — and should follow the cross-reference to DEATH in Bouvier rather than treating hunger as a unified legal topic.
Modern researchers should also be alert to hunger's appearance in constitutional litigation, particularly Eighth Amendment claims in correctional settings (deprivation of food as cruel and unusual punishment) and in international human rights frameworks. These modern doctrinal developments are entirely absent from the historical dictionary sources, which treat hunger only in the narrow criminal defense context.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is terse: "The desire to eat. Hunger is no excuse for larceny." The citations to Hale's Pleas of the Crown (1 Hale, Pl. Cr. 54) and Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Com. 31) confirm that this was settled doctrine by the time Bouvier was writing, not a contested proposition. Hale and Blackstone are consistent authorities, and neither source offers any qualification or exception.
Bouvier's cross-reference to DEATH signals that the dictionary itself treats hunger as a bifurcated subject — excuse doctrine on one side, causation doctrine on the other — without synthesizing them. Researchers should follow both threads separately.
No historical dictionary source surveyed addresses hunger in constitutional, administrative, or public welfare contexts. The silence is not surprising given the period, but it means the historical record offers essentially no guidance for modern doctrinal questions involving food deprivation as a civil rights or regulatory matter.
Jurisdictional Note
The rule that hunger does not excuse theft has been uniform across common law jurisdictions. Modern necessity doctrine varies by jurisdiction in its formal elements and scope, but no U.S. jurisdiction recognizes a freestanding hunger exception to theft liability. Eighth Amendment food-deprivation claims in correctional settings are a federal constitutional matter, but specific standards for what constitutes actionable deprivation have developed through case law rather than statute.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Necessity Defense; Criminal Defenses; Larceny