Definition
A crime is an act or omission that violates a public law and is subject to prosecution and punishment by the state. Unlike a civil wrong, which primarily injures an individual and gives rise to a private lawsuit, a crime is treated as an offense against society as a whole — the state, not the victim, initiates prosecution.
At its broadest, the term encompasses every indictable offense: conduct that a sovereign authority has prohibited and attached criminal penalties to, whether by statute or under the common law. The category includes both felonies and misdemeanors, though crime is not synonymous with felony. All felonies are crimes; not all crimes are felonies.
Crimes are defined and punished by two overlapping sources of authority: enacted statutes and the inherited common law. Common-law offenses — murder, larceny, arson, and others — were as precisely defined in practice as statutory offenses, though the absence of a written text created interpretive difficulty.
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Common Confusion
CRIME vs. FELONY: The two terms are not interchangeable. Felony is a subcategory of crime, historically carrying greater severity and distinct legal consequences (forfeiture, attainder, capital punishment). A misdemeanor is also a crime. Bouvier's source text explicitly flags this: crime is not synonymous with felony.
CRIME vs. TORT: The same act — assault, fraud, conversion — can give rise to both criminal liability and civil tort liability. The distinction lies in who brings the action (the state versus the private party) and the remedy sought (punishment versus compensation). Researchers should not assume that a term appearing in criminal sources carries the same doctrinal weight in civil equity sources, or vice versa.
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Core Elements
A prosecution for crime generally requires the state to establish:
1. A prohibited act or omission (actus reus) — conduct that falls within a legally defined offense.
2. A culpable mental state (mens rea) — intent, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence, as required by the particular offense definition. Common-law crimes generally required a guilty mind; strict liability is a statutory development.
3. Concurrence — the act and the mental state must coincide.
4. Causation — for result crimes (homicide, for example), the act must causally produce the prohibited outcome.
5. Jurisdiction — the offense must fall within the prosecuting sovereign's territorial or subject-matter authority.
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Why It Matters in Research
The most immediate research trap here is the source artifact itself. Any search in the Law Mind corpus for "ORIME" is retrieving material that was originally "CRIME" — a common OCR degradation pattern where a capital C is lost. Researchers encountering "orime," "nrime," or similar near-matches in digitized historical legal texts should treat these as crime and search accordingly.
On the substantive term: the boundary between statutory crimes and common-law crimes shifted dramatically across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early American jurisdictions inherited English common-law offenses wholesale; by the twentieth century, most American states had codified criminal law and some had formally abolished common-law offenses in favor of statutory definitions. A historical source describing the scope of "crime" may be describing a common-law world that no longer exists in the researched jurisdiction.
The non-synonymy of crime and felony is a recurring research trap. Historical sources — including Bouvier — use felony with precision: it carried collateral consequences (forfeiture of goods, corruption of blood, capital punishment eligibility) that mere misdemeanor crimes did not. Importing modern felony/misdemeanor intuitions into pre-twentieth-century sources will produce errors.
The Bouvier fragment also flags that crimes are prosecuted and punished — researchers working on the boundary of regulatory and criminal law should note that administrative penalties and civil forfeitures occupy contested ground that Bouvier-era sources do not address.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's surviving fragment defines crime by reference to its procedural marker — indictability — rather than by moral content or statutory definition. This is characteristic of common-law legal thinking: what makes something a crime is not its inherent wickedness but the fact that the state has attached a criminal prosecution to it. The string of case citations in the fragment (drawn from Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, and New Jersey reporters) reflects the treatise tradition of establishing propositions across multiple jurisdictions rather than resting on a single authority.
Bouvier's explicit statement that crime is not synonymous with felony was an important clarification in its era, when practitioners routinely needed to know which procedural and substantive rules tracked felony classification specifically. Modern researchers using Bouvier should note that the felony/misdemeanor taxonomy it assumes has been substantially reorganized in most American jurisdictions, and that the common-law forfeiture and attainder consequences of felony conviction were largely abolished by statute during the nineteenth century.
The fragment's reference to common-law offenses being "as precisely ascertained" as statutory offenses represents a period defense of common-law criminal jurisdiction against the rising argument that criminal liability should require explicit statutory text — a debate that was not fully resolved in the United States until well into the twentieth century.
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Jurisdictional Note
A small number of American states retain common-law criminal offenses; most have codified criminal law and some have expressly abolished uncodified common-law crimes. Federal criminal law is entirely statutory — there are no federal common-law crimes. Researchers working across time periods should verify whether the jurisdiction at issue recognized common-law offenses at the relevant date.
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