Definition
An indecent exhibition is any public display or showing that offends against public morals or common decency — conduct characterized at common law by the Latin phrase contra bonos mores, meaning "against good morals." The term encompasses a range of conduct in which something inherently offensive to public sensibilities is exposed or displayed before others.
The term has been applied historically in two overlapping contexts:
1. Physical indecency: The display of the human body, or of acts of a sexual or otherwise offensive nature, in a public setting.
2. Indecent treatment or display of objects: The public exhibition of things whose display shocks public morals, including corpses, human remains, or other matter whose exposure violates prevailing standards of decency. Bouvier's classic illustration — the public exhibition or dissection of a dead body — falls here.
Modern criminal codes have largely replaced the common law category with specific statutory offenses such as public indecency, obscenity, or lewd exhibition, but the underlying concept persists.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Indecent" means offensive to accepted standards of decency or morality; "exhibition" means a public showing or display. Together, the phrase carries an obvious lay meaning.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Indecent" — "Offensive to modesty and delicacy; unfit to be seen or heard; immodest; obscene." "Exhibition" — "The act of exhibiting for inspection, or of holding forth to view; manifestation; display."
The lay and legal meanings are closely aligned, but the legal usage carries a technical weight the common phrase does not: at common law, indecent exhibition was a recognized criminal category — an offense against public order — not merely a description of distasteful conduct. The determination of what qualifies is normative and era-dependent, making the legal boundary far less obvious than the plain words suggest.
Common Confusion
INDECENT EXHIBITION vs. OBSCENITY: These terms overlap but are not identical. Obscenity — as developed under modern constitutional doctrine — requires a formal multi-factor analysis focused heavily on sexual content and community standards of prurience. Indecent exhibition, as a common law concept, was broader and less precisely defined: it could attach to non-sexual conduct (such as corpse display) that would not qualify as obscene in the modern legal sense. Researchers conflating the two risk importing modern obscenity doctrine into historical sources where it does not belong.
INDECENT EXHIBITION vs. PUBLIC INDECENCY: Public indecency typically refers to exposure of the body or sexual conduct in a public place. Indecent exhibition is the older and wider category, of which public indecency may be understood as a subset.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is chronological drift. "Indecent exhibition" as it appears in historical sources — statutes, indictments, treatises, and cases from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — carries a common law meaning anchored to the contra bonos mores standard. That standard was not fixed; courts applied it to whatever conduct the community regarded as grossly offensive at a given time. A researcher reading a historical indictment for indecent exhibition cannot assume the conduct involved sexual exposure; it may have involved a traveling freak show, a dissection, or the display of a malformed infant.
The term largely disappears from modern statutory codes as a standalone offense. Modern researchers working with nineteenth-century criminal records, grand jury indictments, or early penal codes should map the historical term carefully onto whatever modern equivalent their jurisdiction uses before drawing comparative conclusions.
The reference in Bouvier to the display of a dead body for dissection points to an intersection with a separate body of legal history: the law of burial rights, the regulation of anatomical schools, and the grave-robbing prosecutions common in the early nineteenth century. Researchers tracing indecent exhibition in that period may find relevant material in sources focused on body-snatching and anatomy law rather than in the obscenity or public morals literature.
Jurisdictional variation in the historical period is significant: some American states codified the offense in early penal statutes; others left it entirely to the common law. The content of the offense therefore varies by jurisdiction and by period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines indecent exhibition as any exhibition contra bonos mores and gives as the primary illustration the taking of a dead body for purposes of dissection or public exhibition, citing 2 T.R. 734 — a reference to Term Reports (Durnford & East), an English King's Bench reporter. The definition is notably spare: Bouvier offers no elements, no limiting principle, and no discussion of what else might qualify beyond the corpse example. The contra bonos mores standard does all the work, which is characteristic of how early American legal dictionaries handled offenses that were essentially common law misdemeanors against public order.
What Bouvier does not address — and what no nineteenth-century dictionary adequately captures — is how courts determined the threshold of indecency as community standards shifted. The definition is circular in the way common law morals offenses often were: an exhibition is indecent if it offends decency. Modern legal sources are substantially more precise on this point, though they have migrated to different terminology. Researchers should not treat Bouvier's brevity as evidence that the offense was narrow; it reflects the assumption that judges and juries would know indecency when they saw it.
Jurisdictional Note
At common law, indecent exhibition was a misdemeanor in English and most American jurisdictions. American states diverged early in how and whether they codified the offense; some merged it into broader public morality statutes while others allowed it to persist as a common law offense well into the twentieth century. Modern researchers should check whether their target jurisdiction has a specific statutory successor before searching for "indecent exhibition" in current materials.