Definition
In Roman civil law, plagium was the crime of man-stealing: the unlawful taking, enticing away, or concealing of a free person, a child, or a slave. The offense encompassed three related but distinct acts — (1) abducting or stealing a free person or child; (2) persuading a slave to flee from the master; and (3) harboring or concealing a slave without the master's knowledge. The governing text is the Digest of Justinian, specifically Dig. 48.15.6, which treats plagium under the Lex Fabia de plagiariis, a Roman statute criminalizing these forms of unlawful taking. The term also appears in Scots law, where it functioned as a recognized common law crime roughly equivalent to kidnapping or child-stealing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Abduction, especially of a child.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Manstealing; kidnapping.
Editorial note: Common usage tracks the Roman law meaning closely enough that the term carries no false friend problem for general readers. The legal significance lies in scope: Roman plagium was broader than modern kidnapping, expressly including the corruption or harboring of slaves as a distinct form of the offense — conduct that has no direct analogue in modern criminal law.
Common Confusion
Plagium should not be confused with plagiarism. Both words share the Latin root plagiarius (a kidnapper, later extended metaphorically to one who steals another's words), but plagiarism is a modern concept concerning intellectual property and academic integrity, not a legal crime in Roman or Scots law. The terminological overlap occasionally causes confusion in historical and literary scholarship. They are unrelated legal concepts.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Roman law recognized plagium in two principal modes: (1) plagium of free persons — taking a free man, woman, or child into bondage or otherwise depriving them of liberty; and (2) plagium relating to slaves — inducing a slave to flee, or sheltering a runaway slave against the master's will. Scots law adopted the term as a unitary crime focused on the unlawful taking and detention of a person, particularly a child, without consent.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering plagium in historical legal materials need to hold two distinct legal contexts in mind simultaneously: Roman civil law and Scots common law. In Roman sources, the term operates within a slave-holding legal order and the offense of harboring a fugitive slave is treated on equal footing with kidnapping a free person — a framing entirely foreign to modern criminal categories. Direct citation to Dig. 48.15.6 is consistent across all historical dictionary sources and provides a reliable anchor for Roman law research.
In Scots law, plagium survived into the modern period as a common law crime. Burrill's citation to 2 Brown's Reports 288 is the key navigational marker for Scots usage and distinguishes the Scottish trajectory from the Roman one. Researchers working in Scottish legal history or comparative criminal law should follow that thread separately from Roman law sources.
A further trap: because plagium appears in Latin, it surfaces in a wide range of texts — civil law treatises, ecclesiastical records, early criminal law digests, and Scots court reports — without always signaling which tradition is governing. Context must be checked carefully before assuming the Roman or the Scots meaning applies.
The term does not appear as a recognized crime in English common law, and it has no statutory counterpart in modern American law. If encountered in American legal materials, it almost certainly reflects scholarly or comparative reference rather than operative domestic law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's are in precise agreement on the core Roman law definition, all three drawing on Calvin's Lexicon and Dig. 48.15.6. This consistency is notable and reflects the stable transmission of the Roman law definition through the civilian tradition. Burrill alone adds the Scots law dimension with the Brown's Reports citation, making it the most complete source among the three for comparative research purposes.
What all three sources omit is any discussion of the Lex Fabia de plagiariis itself, the Roman statute that gave plagium its criminal character. Researchers needing the statutory background must go beyond these dictionaries to civilian treatises or direct engagement with the Digest. The dictionaries also do not trace how plagium evolved or was received differently across civilian jurisdictions — French, Spanish, and Scottish law each processed the Roman inheritance differently, and none of that variation is captured here.
Jurisdictional Note
Plagium as an operative legal term is essentially confined to Roman civil law sources and Scots common law. It does not appear as a statutory or common law term of art in English or American law. In Scotland, plagium retained legal force as a common law crime focused on child abduction; its continued vitality in Scots criminal law should be verified against current Scottish authority.