Definition
Misprision is a criminal law term with two principal meanings that have operated simultaneously across centuries of common law, often causing confusion between them.
1. CONCEALMENT OF CRIME (negative misprision). The knowing concealment of a crime — most commonly treason or felony — without active participation in it. The concealing party takes no step to notify authorities. This is the meaning that survives most robustly in modern law, particularly in federal statutes criminalizing misprision of felony and misprision of treason.
2. UNNAMED SERIOUS OFFENSE (positive misprision). Any considerable misdemeanor or high offense that lacks a specific name at law — a residual category for conduct bordering on, but falling short of, capital crime. Coke captured this usage: every act of treason or felony contains within it a misprision. This meaning is largely obsolete in modern practice but appears frequently in historical sources.
3. CLERICAL OR OFFICIAL NEGLECT. In older procedural contexts, misprision also referred to negligence or mistake by a clerk or officer of court — an oversight in keeping or transcribing a record. This usage is effectively extinct outside of historical legal documents.
The word's center of gravity in modern American and English law lies squarely in meaning (1): concealment without assent.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Despising or holding something in contempt; disdain, scorn. Also, failing to see the value in something; undervaluing.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Misapprehension; misconception; mistake. Also neglect, undervaluing, or contempt — noted as archaic or obsolete even then.
Editorial note: The common and legal meanings share a distant root in the idea of something being slighted or overlooked, but they have diverged almost entirely. Ordinary English uses misprision (where it appears at all) to mean contempt or scorn toward a person or thing. The legal term does not carry that evaluative sense — it describes a specific failure of civic duty: concealing knowledge of crime. A researcher encountering misprision in a literary or general historical source should not import that meaning into a legal document, and vice versa.
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Common Confusion
Two confusions recur in research and practice.
First, misprision of treason is frequently conflated with treason itself. The distinction matters: misprision of treason requires knowledge and concealment without any assent or aid. The moment a party gives any degree of assent or assistance, the offense becomes treason proper. The line is thin and was historically disputed, but it is jurisdictionally and penally significant.
Second, misprision of felony is sometimes confused with accessory after the fact. Both involve a person who knows of a felony and fails to act. The distinction is that an accessory after the fact renders some assistance to the felon; misprision of felony requires only concealment, with no maintenance or aid given to the offender. In many modern jurisdictions, misprision of felony as a standalone offense has been absorbed into accessory liability or narrowed significantly by statute.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
MISPRISION OF TREASON: Knowing concealment of treason without assent. Historically distinguished from treason by the absence of any aid or encouragement. Criminalized under federal law in the United States.
MISPRISION OF FELONY: Knowing concealment of a felony without maintenance of the felon. Recognized at common law; retained in federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 4). Many states have abolished or narrowed the common law version.
NEGATIVE MISPRISION: The concealment of something that ought to be revealed — the broader conceptual category encompassing both treason and felony variants.
POSITIVE MISPRISION: The commission of something that ought not to be done — the residual serious-offense category. Historically significant; rarely invoked in modern law.
CLERICAL MISPRISION: Neglect or mistake by a court officer in maintaining records. Procedural and historical; effectively obsolete.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term misprision is a genuine research trap because it carries at least three distinct meanings, and historical sources — including the major dictionaries — do not always signal which meaning is operative. A researcher reading an eighteenth-century indictment, a Tudor statute, and a modern federal case will encounter three different animals under the same name.
In the Law Mind corpus, the shift from positive to negative misprision as the dominant sense tracks roughly from the late seventeenth century forward. Earlier sources — particularly those drawing on Coke — emphasize the residual serious-offense meaning. Sources from the eighteenth century onward (Blackstone, the Stephens commentaries) increasingly confine the term to concealment. Researchers working in pre-1700 materials should be especially alert to positive misprision being invoked where modern instinct would expect a named offense.
Jurisdictional instability is significant. English common law recognized misprision of felony as a general duty to report crime; American states varied enormously in whether they adopted, codified, or effectively abandoned it. Federal law retained the term explicitly. When a state court source omits misprision of felony entirely, that silence may reflect abolition rather than oversight.
The concealment-without-assent distinction in misprision of treason has particular sensitivity in historical research involving sedition, loyalty prosecutions, and wartime cases. The boundary between misprision and principal treason was often contested precisely because it determined whether a defendant could be executed.
Burrill's procedural usage — clerical misprision — appears in records and statute references with enough frequency to mislead. If a source references misprision in a context involving court records, writs, or judicial process rather than substantive crime, Burrill's meaning is likely the correct frame.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The six source dictionaries converge on the core distinction between negative misprision (concealment) and the residual unnamed-offense category, but they organize and emphasize these meanings differently.
Black's First Edition leads with the residual-offense meaning, citing Coke, and treats concealment as secondary. Black's Second Edition reorganizes around contempt and seditious conduct as the primary sense — a framing that diverges from most other sources and reflects the particular preoccupations of that edition's period. Researchers should not treat the Second Edition's ordering as authoritative on historical priority.
Bouvier and Anderson are the most analytically precise on the negative/positive distinction, explicitly labeling and defining each. Bouvier references the Act of Congress, grounding the entry in positive American law and making it the most practically useful of the six for federal research.
Rapalje & Lawrence offers the Old French etymology (mesprendre — to take wrongly, to commit an error) and situates misprision in its linguistic lineage, which aids in reading medieval and early modern sources where variant spellings (mesprision, mesprision) appear.
Burrill is the only dictionary to treat the clerical meaning substantively, tracing it to the Statute of 14 Edward (left incomplete in the source text but identifiable from context). This entry is indispensable for procedural historians working in early English court records.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the modern federal statutory context, which has largely supplanted common law misprision in American practice. None of the entries addresses the requirement — developed through twentieth-century case law — that federal misprision of felony requires an affirmative act of concealment, not mere silence. That development must be sourced outside the dictionary shelf.
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Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, misprision of felony survives as a federal statutory offense but has been significantly eroded or abolished in many states, either expressly or through non-adoption of the common law rule. England retained the offense at common law but its practical use declined sharply through the twentieth century. Federal courts have interpreted 18 U.S.C. § 4 to require an affirmative concealment act beyond passive non-disclosure, a limitation not present in the classical common law formulation.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Misprision of Felony
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Misprision of Treason
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Accessory After the Fact
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