Definition
A threat; the declaration or show of a disposition or determination to inflict an evil or injury upon another. In legal usage, menace is not confined to threats of physical violence or threats to accuse a person of crime. It extends to any communication designed to place another in fear of harm — including threats to expose immoral conduct, damage reputation, or cause economic injury. The term functions primarily in two legal contexts:
1. As an element of duress or coercion in contract law, where menace may void consent if it overcame the free will of a party.
2. As a component of criminal offenses — including assault, extortion, and blackmail — where threatening conduct is itself the actus reus or an aggravating element.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A perceived threat or danger; the act of threatening; also, informally, an annoying or bothersome person or thing.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The show of an intention to inflict evil; a threat or threatening; indication of a probable evil or catastrophe to come.
The ordinary sense of menace tracks the legal meaning more closely than many legal terms do, but the gap matters at the margins. In common speech, menace often describes a generalized atmosphere of danger or an irritating person. In law, menace is a specific, directed act — a declaration or show of intent to inflict identifiable harm on a particular person. The informal usage ("that dog is a menace") carries no legal weight. The legal concept also reaches threats of reputational and moral injury that casual usage might not recognize as menacing at all.
Common Confusion
Menace is frequently used interchangeably with threat in both legal sources and everyday speech, and for most practical purposes the terms are synonymous. The distinction worth flagging is one of formality and context: threat is the broader, more commonly used term in modern statutes and pleadings; menace appears more often in older authorities and in specific doctrinal contexts — particularly duress in contract and extortion by written communication. Researchers should also distinguish menace from assault: assault requires that the recipient apprehend imminent harmful or offensive contact; menace, especially in extortion and coercion contexts, may operate through written or indirect communication without any requirement of immediacy. Anderson's Dictionary of Law signals this connection by cross-referencing both ASSAULT and DEFENSE, reflecting menace's dual role as an offense and as a legal justification for responsive conduct.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in older sources will encounter menace where modern materials use threat or criminal threat. This substitution is not merely stylistic — it sometimes signals a different doctrinal framework. In nineteenth-century contract law, menace appears as one of the formal vitiating factors for consent alongside fraud, undue influence, and mistake. Modern contract codes (including the Uniform Commercial Code and Restatement Second of Contracts) typically use duress and threat rather than menace, so tracing a doctrine across time requires recognizing both vocabularies.
In criminal law, Rapalje & Lawrence's entry points to a critical historical development: the English Larceny Act (24 & 25 Vict. c. 96, § 45) codified demanding with menaces as a felony, and American jurisdictions enacted parallel statutes. Researchers working on the history of extortion and blackmail must identify which statutory generation applies to the sources under review, as the elements — and the meaning of menace within them — shifted with each revision.
Bouvier's expansion of menace beyond threats of physical harm to include threats of moral accusation reflects a specific strand of English authority from the 1890s. Researchers citing Bouvier on this point should verify whether the jurisdiction under study adopted that broader reading; not all American courts did.
The cross-reference in Anderson's to DEFENSE, 1 reflects a point that researchers sometimes overlook: menace can ground an affirmative defense. A party who acted under menace may plead coercion or duress. This bidirectional function — menace as offense and as defense — means the term surfaces in unexpected procedural postures.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the core definition: menace is a threat, a declaration of intent to inflict evil. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier agree on this baseline. Rapalje & Lawrence add the statutory criminal context without elaborating on the civil dimension. Anderson's is the thinnest entry, functioning as a pure cross-reference.
The most substantively useful historical entry is Bouvier's, which makes two contributions the others omit: first, the explicit statement that menace is not restricted to threats of violence or criminal accusation; second, the note that a person making menaces may be held to bail — a procedural consequence reflecting how seriously early American law treated threatening conduct as an independent public harm, not merely a prelude to another offense.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any treatment of menace in the context of written threatening communications, which became increasingly important as postal extortion and blackmail by letter developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Researchers working on that period will need to supplement these dictionary entries with statutory and case materials directly.
Jurisdictional Note
The criminal offense of demanding with menaces traces to English statutory origin and was adopted unevenly across American jurisdictions. Modern American statutes typically use the language of extortion, coercion, or criminal threats rather than menace, though the underlying conduct is substantially the same. Researchers working across common law jurisdictions should expect terminological divergence even when the doctrinal elements are functionally identical.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Menacing and Criminal Threats (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)