Definition
"Imposed upon the plaintiff the crime" is a technical pleading phrase used in common law actions for slander. It describes the actionable gravamen of the plaintiff's declaration — specifically, that the defendant's words directly charged, attributed, or fixed upon the plaintiff the commission of a crime. The phrase operates as a term of art in defamation pleading to signal that the words spoken were not merely insulting or ambiguous but rose to the level of a definite criminal imputation sufficient to sustain an action without proof of special damage.
In slander law, not all injurious words are actionable per se. Words were actionable per se only when they fell within recognized categories, of which charging a person with a crime punishable by imprisonment or involving moral turpitude was the most established. The pleading phrase "imposed upon the plaintiff the crime" was the formal mechanism by which a declaration alleged that the defendant's spoken words accomplished exactly this: they fixed criminal guilt on the plaintiff in the minds of hearers.
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Common Confusion
This phrase should not be confused with the substance of a criminal charge or indictment. It has no meaning in criminal law. It is entirely a civil pleading formulation. Researchers encountering the phrase in early reports should also distinguish it from related but distinct slander categories: words that merely imputed "misconduct" or "dishonesty" without specifying a crime, and words actionable only upon proof of special damage. The phrase signals the higher, per se category.
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Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is almost exclusively a creature of classical common law pleading and appears primarily in English and early American slander reports from roughly the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. Researchers should be aware of several navigational points:
First, the phrase is a pleading artifact. It marks a period when defamation declarations required precise technical language to establish actionability. As common law pleading gave way to code pleading in the United States (beginning in earnest after the New York Field Code of 1848) and to modern notice pleading, the formal phrase disappeared from practice even though the underlying concept — that charging a crime is slander per se — survived. A researcher looking at post-code-reform cases will find the substance but not the phrase.
Second, the phrase's appearance in a report is a reliable signal that the case involves slander per se analysis, not libel, and not slander requiring special damage. This matters when searching historical corpus materials: filtering for this phrase efficiently isolates a specific doctrinal category.
Third, the Rapalje & Lawrence citation to 2 Barn. & C. 283, 284 refers to an English King's Bench report from Barnewall & Cresswell's Reports, a standard early nineteenth-century English series. Researchers using Law Mind should be alert that cases cited in Rapalje & Lawrence for this phrase will predominantly be English authorities, reflecting the period when American courts followed English slander doctrine closely before American jurisdictions began developing independent approaches to defamation per se categories.
Fourth, the scope of "crime" in this context was itself contested. Historical courts disagreed over whether the imputed crime needed to be an indictable felony, or whether a serious misdemeanor sufficed. The Rapalje & Lawrence citation to the felony action context ("OF FELONY, in an action for slander") suggests the core application involved felony-level imputation, but doctrine varied.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treat this phrase as a sub-entry under slander doctrine, cross-referencing it specifically to the felony context in the note "OF FELONY, (in an action for slander). 2 Barn. & C. 283, 284." This is a characteristically spare treatment — the dictionary does not define the phrase at length but anchors it to the felony-slander line of authority, which was the most clearly established branch of slander per se at common law.
The citation to Barnewall & Cresswell is telling: it points to English King's Bench authority, consistent with the period when American slander doctrine was substantially derivative of English common law. Rapalje & Lawrence do not address the question of whether lesser crimes (misdemeanors) satisfied the "imposed the crime" standard, nor do they discuss the evolution of the phrase under code pleading regimes — a gap researchers should account for when using the dictionary as a sole source.
No other historical dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus appear to carry a discrete entry for this phrase, suggesting it was treated as a pleading formula sufficiently familiar to practitioners of the era to require only brief notation rather than extended definition.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs to English common law pleading and was carried into American practice in the pre-code era. After code pleading reforms swept American jurisdictions in the second half of the nineteenth century, the formal phrase was abandoned, though the underlying doctrine that imputing a crime is actionable per se persists across virtually all American jurisdictions in some form, with variation in which crimes qualify.
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