Definition
An archaic term from mining community vernacular denoting an accusation that a miner had committed the crime of buggery with a mule. The term had no formal statutory definition but acquired legal significance in the context of defamation law: to charge a person with "mulage" was held to constitute actionable libel per se, meaning the statement was presumed injurious to reputation without requiring proof of special damages.
Why It Matters in Research
MULAGE is a narrow, contextually specific term whose legal relevance is almost entirely confined to a single line of defamation cases arising from mining community usage, primarily in Kentucky and surrounding Appalachian jurisdictions in the early twentieth century. Researchers encountering this term in historical case records should treat it as a defamation marker rather than a criminal law term — no separate criminal offense called "mulage" appears to have existed; the underlying conduct would have been prosecuted as sodomy or buggery under the applicable criminal statute.
The term illustrates a recurring research challenge: community-specific slang that generated litigation without ever achieving widespread legal formalization. It will not appear in statutory indices, criminal codes, or general treatises. Its presence in Bouvier's is essentially a defamation law entry masquerading as a vocabulary entry — the important legal point is not what the word means, but that uttering it was actionable.
Researchers working in early twentieth-century defamation, slander per se, or libel per se doctrine should note that courts of this era frequently extended per se treatment to accusations imputing crimes involving moral turpitude, even when the accusation used localized or occupational slang rather than formal legal language. MULAGE fits squarely within that pattern.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the sole historical dictionary treatment of this term, defining it tersely as a miners' term for the crime of buggery committed with a mule, and noting that to charge one with "mulage" is libelous, citing 162 Ky. 69, 172 S.W. 993. No other major historical legal dictionaries — not Black's, not Wharton's — appear to have treated the term independently, which itself reflects how narrow and jurisdiction-specific this usage was.
The Bouvier entry is notable for what it omits: it does not analyze the defamation framework being applied, nor does it situate the term within the broader doctrine of libel per se for accusations of criminal conduct. The citation to the Kentucky appellate decision (Salyer v. Salyer or a similar styled case from that reporter volume) grounds the entry in actual litigation rather than theoretical usage, which is characteristic of Bouvier's later editions incorporating case law.
Researchers should be cautious about reading Bouvier's treatment as evidence of widespread currency. The term likely appeared in Bouvier's precisely because it generated a published appellate decision — not because it was in common use across American mining communities.
Jurisdictional Note
The documented legal usage of this term originates in Kentucky case law from the early twentieth century. No evidence exists of parallel treatment in other jurisdictions under this specific term, though analogous defamation principles — holding that accusations of crimes involving moral turpitude are actionable per se — applied broadly across American common law jurisdictions of the same era.