Definition
Intentional describes conduct that is done deliberately, with purpose or design, as opposed to conduct that is accidental, negligent, or the result of mere inadvertence. In legal usage, the word modifies both acts and consequences: an act may be intentional even if the precise harm that results was not the harm the actor had in mind.
The core legal meaning focuses on the actor's state of mind at the time of the conduct. A person acts intentionally when they engage in a course of action consciously and volitionally — not by reflex, mistake, or compulsion. In tort law, this mental state is what separates intentional torts from negligence and strict liability. In criminal law, it maps most closely onto the mental states of "purpose" or "knowledge" in the Model Penal Code framework, though precise terminology varies by jurisdiction and statute.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Intended or planned; done deliberately or voluntarily.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Done by intention or design; intended; designed; as, the act was intentional, not accidental.
The common meaning and the legal meaning largely align at the surface — both treat "intentional" as the opposite of "accidental." The meaningful legal gap lies in what is required to be intentional. Ordinary speech tends to assume that an act is intentional only if both the act and its specific result were planned. Law does not always require that the resulting harm was intended, only that the act producing it was. A person who throws a punch intending to startle but not to injure may still be held to have committed an intentional tort if contact results. The focus is on the volitional quality of the act, not necessarily the foresight of its exact consequences.
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Common Confusion
INTENTIONAL vs. WILLFUL vs. KNOWING: These terms are often used interchangeably in casual legal writing but carry distinct weight depending on context. "Willful" frequently implies a higher degree of culpability — that the actor not only acted deliberately but did so with awareness that the conduct was wrongful or prohibited. "Knowing" in criminal law (following the Model Penal Code) describes awareness of circumstances or practical certainty that a result will follow, which is distinct from acting with purpose. Researchers should not assume that a source using "intentional" means what a later source means by "willful," or vice versa.
INTENTIONAL vs. ACCIDENTAL: Bouvier's highlights an important asymmetry here. The question of whether an act is intentional is analyzed from the perspective of the actor, not the victim. An occurrence can be unforeseeable and entirely unexpected from the injured party's point of view — a casualty or mishap they did nothing to bring about — and yet the act causing it may still be classified as intentional if the actor chose to act deliberately. This distinction has direct consequences for how insurance clauses, exclusions, and liability standards are applied.
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Why It Matters in Research
The word "intentional" appears across virtually every doctrinal area of the corpus — torts, criminal law, contract, insurance, constitutional civil rights — and its meaning is not stable across those contexts. Researchers must be careful not to carry a definition from one domain into another.
In tort law, the intentional/negligent dividing line controls which cause of action applies, which defenses are available, and whether punitive damages are in play. The transferred intent doctrine — addressed in the encyclopedia entry linked above — extends intentional tort liability to cases where the actor intended harm to one person but harmed another, a result that has no parallel in negligence analysis.
In insurance contexts, "intentional acts exclusions" in liability policies turn entirely on the meaning of intentional, and courts have divided on whether the exclusion requires that the actor intended the act, intended harm, or intended the specific harm that occurred. Historical sources will not resolve this split cleanly; it has been heavily litigated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In constitutional civil rights litigation, particularly under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, courts have distinguished intentional discrimination from disparate impact, and the word "intentional" carries specialized constitutional significance that differs from its tort law usage.
When reading nineteenth-century sources, researchers should note that the vocabulary of mental states was less systematized. Bouvier's era did not cleanly separate intentional, willful, malicious, and deliberate the way modern doctrine does. A historical source describing conduct as "intentional" may or may not be making the same distinction a modern court would draw.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary offers a compact but instructive definition, quoting directly from case authority: "The word 'intentional' refers alone to the person inflicting the injury, and if as to the person injured the injury was unforeseen, unexpected, not brought about through his agency designedly, or was without his foresight or was a casualty or mishap not intended to befall him, then the occurrence was accidental." This framing makes explicit something that modern hornbooks sometimes leave implicit — that the intentional/accidental analysis is actor-centered, not victim-centered.
What Bouvier's does not address is the internal complexity that later doctrine would develop: the distinction between intending an act and intending its consequences, the Model Penal Code's four-tier culpability scheme, or the doctrine of transferred intent. The entry reflects a period when "intentional" was doing relatively simple definitional work, before modern tort and criminal law carved the mental state landscape into finer gradations.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Intentional Torts — Persons — Transferred Intent Doctrine (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia)
Intentional Torts — Property and Economic — Intentional Interference with Contract (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia)
Intentional Torts — Persons — Consent as a Defense to Intentional Torts (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia)
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