Definition
Repetundarum crimen (also rendered crimen repetundarum) is a term from Roman law denoting the crime of extortion or bribery committed by a magistrate or other person holding public office. The offense consisted of the wrongful exaction of money or property from those subject to an official's power — the name derives from the idea of money that must be "given back," reflecting the original remedy's focus on recovery of what had been unlawfully taken. Over time, Roman law expanded the concept beyond simple restitution into a fully criminal prosecution, with penalties including exile, infamy, and disqualification from public life.
In modern legal scholarship, the term is used exclusively in the historical and comparative sense, as a reference point in discussions of Roman public law, the origins of anti-corruption doctrine, and the institutional development of accountability for those who exercise governmental power.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter repetundarum crimen most often in three contexts: Roman law scholarship, comparative legal history tracing the lineage of modern extortion and bribery statutes, and older Anglo-American treatises that cite Roman law as a foundation for public office accountability principles.
The primary trap in historical sources is scope drift. The historical dictionaries define the term narrowly as bribery or extortion by a magistrate, but the Roman legal regime was considerably more elaborate. The leges de repetundis — statutes enacted from the late Republic onward — evolved from civil recovery actions (recovering what was extorted) into standing criminal courts (quaestiones perpetuae) with broader jurisdiction. Researchers relying solely on Black's or Burrill's single-sentence definitions will miss this evolution entirely.
Burrill's entry is the most useful of the three, citing Dig. 48.11 and Cod. 9.27 — the Digest and Code titles directly governing repetundae — as well as Hallifax's Analysis of the Civil Law. These are genuine navigational anchors into the Roman primary sources. The Digest title (48.11) covers the lex Iulia de repetundis, the principal Augustan-era statute on the subject, and is the right starting point for anyone doing primary Roman law research on this term.
A secondary research note: the term appears in older Anglo-American treatises not as operative law but as learned reference — authors invoking Roman authority to argue that corruption in office was a crime known to all civilized legal systems. When you find the term in a 17th- or 18th-century English legal text, it is almost always doing rhetorical or comparative work, not describing applicable doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in complete agreement: Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's give identical substantive definitions. The identity of language across editions of Black's suggests the 2nd edition simply carried the entry forward without revision, which is consistent with the term's status as a settled historical reference rather than a live doctrinal concept.
Burrill's entry is the most scholarly of the three, appending the Calvinus Lexicon Iuridicum citation (a standard 17th-century Latin legal dictionary), Hallifax's Analytical work, and the Digest and Code references. This additional apparatus is genuinely useful to researchers and distinguishes Burrill's from the Black's entries, which cite only Calvinus.
What all three dictionaries miss is the procedural and historical development of repetundae law — specifically the transformation from a civil remedy (the actio de repetundis, seeking return of extorted property) into a criminal proceeding before a permanent jury court, and the successive statutory layers from the lex Calpurnia (149 BCE) through the lex Iulia under Augustus. For a researcher needing that history, the dictionaries are a starting point only.
The apparent intrusion of replevin-related text at the end of the Burrill's entry is a typographical artifact of the source — it belongs to a neighboring entry and should be disregarded.
Jurisdictional Note
Repetundarum crimen has no operative force in any common law jurisdiction. It is a purely historical and comparative term. Civil law jurisdictions whose systems descend from Roman law may treat the underlying concept as a doctrinal ancestor of modern corruption statutes, but the term itself is not used in contemporary legislation or adjudication in any jurisdiction.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Roman Law; Corruption and Public Office; Extortion (Historical Development)