Definition
Quasi crimes are offenses that occupy a middle ground between true criminal liability and ordinary civil wrongdoing. They are acts or omissions against the public order or public welfare that the law treats as punishable — typically through fines, forfeitures, or penalties — but which have not been formally designated as crimes or misdemeanors by the legislature or common law.
The category captures conduct that resembles a crime in its public character and its need for suppression, but lacks the full machinery of criminal prosecution: no indictment, no criminal conviction, no penal sentence in the traditional sense. The wrong is against the general public or a local community, and the remedy is characteristically a financial penalty rather than imprisonment.
Qui tam actions fall within this category — proceedings in which a private party sues on behalf of the government to recover a statutory forfeiture, with the plaintiff sharing in the recovery. Violations of regulatory statutes that impose civil penalties without criminal classification are likewise treated as quasi criminal in character.
Common Confusion
QUASI CRIMES vs. MISDEMEANORS: Misdemeanors are true crimes, carrying criminal conviction and the attendant legal consequences (criminal record, potential incarceration, loss of civil rights in some jurisdictions). Quasi crimes are not crimes at all in the technical sense — no conviction issues, no criminal stigma attaches, and the proceeding is typically civil in form even when punitive in purpose. Researchers who encounter the phrase "quasi criminal proceeding" in historical sources should not assume the underlying conduct was classified as a crime.
QUASI CRIMES vs. CIVIL WRONGS (TORTS): An ordinary tort is a wrong against a private individual, remedied by compensatory damages running to the victim. A quasi crime is a wrong against the public, remedied by a penalty or forfeiture running (at least in part) to the government or a statutory relator. The distinction matters for identifying which court had jurisdiction and which procedural rules applied.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Public regulatory penalties: Fines and forfeitures imposed for violation of a public regulatory statute — building codes, licensing requirements, health ordinances — where the legislature has not made the violation a crime.
Qui tam forfeitures: Statutory penalties recoverable by a private informer suing on behalf of the government, with the informer entitled to a share. Historically common in customs, revenue, and trade regulation.
Neglect of public duty: Omissions by individuals or quasi-public bodies (such as local administrative bodies) to perform duties imposed by statute or usage, where the sanction is a forfeiture rather than criminal punishment.
Why It Matters in Research
The category of quasi crimes is a historical organizing concept more than a term of art in modern statutory law. Modern legislatures have largely replaced it by specifically designating offenses as civil violations, administrative infractions, or strict-liability misdemeanors, with the procedural consequences spelled out explicitly. When researchers encounter "quasi crime" in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century legal materials, the term signals that the source is working in a period before that legislative clarification was complete.
Several research traps arise from this history:
First, the procedural classification of an action as quasi criminal affected whether constitutional protections applied. Courts in the nineteenth century regularly held that qui tam and forfeiture proceedings were civil in form and therefore did not require grand jury indictment or the full panoply of criminal procedure protections. Modern constitutional doctrine has complicated this — the Supreme Court has examined whether "civil" penalties are so punitive in effect as to trigger criminal procedural guarantees — but older sources will not reflect this development.
Second, the corpus contains substantial material on local and municipal penalties that courts classified as quasi criminal. Researchers tracing the history of regulatory enforcement, administrative penalties, or municipal governance should look for this term as a gateway into that body of law.
Third, the connection to quasi corporations (flagged in the Black's entry) is not coincidental. Both concepts arise from the same nineteenth-century jurisprudential project of reasoning by analogy from established common-law categories to new institutional and regulatory phenomena. Recognizing this shared intellectual context helps researchers understand why these terms cluster together in treatises and court opinions of that era.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the most useful working definition in the historical corpus: quasi crimes "embrace all offenses not crimes or misdemeanors, but that are in the nature of crimes — a class of offenses against the public which have not been declared crimes, but wrongs against the general or local public which it is proper should be repressed or punished by forfeitures and penalties." The entry explicitly includes qui tam actions and forfeitures for neglect or violation of public duties.
What Black's does not do — and what historical dictionaries generally fail to address — is the procedural dimension: what rights a defendant in a quasi-criminal proceeding actually possessed. That question was contested throughout the period in which the term was in active use, and researchers should not assume the dictionaries resolved it.
The incidental Black's reference to quasi corporations in the same definitional neighborhood is instructive for the researcher's purposes: it confirms that the "quasi" prefix in nineteenth-century legal usage consistently marked a category of analogy — things that functioned like the named concept without fully being it, and whose legal treatment therefore required case-by-case judicial construction.
Jurisdictional Note
The term was more systematically developed in American legal writing than in English sources, reflecting the heavier American reliance on statutory forfeitures and qui tam enforcement in the nineteenth century. Jurisdictional variation in how states classified regulatory penalties means that conduct treated as a quasi crime in one state might be a misdemeanor or a purely civil matter in another. Researchers should not assume uniform treatment across state lines.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Inchoate Crimes — Solicitation; Inchoate Crimes — Abandonment and Renunciation (for context on the outer boundaries of criminal liability and how quasi-criminal conduct relates to incomplete or preparatory offenses)
The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia: Contracts — Classification (for the parallel use of the "quasi" prefix in quasi-contract doctrine, useful for understanding the broader jurisprudential framework)