ROBBERY - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

See encyclopedia: Robbery -- Elements and Degrees →

ROBBERYAuthored

The Law Mind • 1318 words

Definition

The felonious taking of personal property from the person or immediate presence of another, against that person's will, accomplished by force or by putting the victim in fear. Robbery is distinguished from ordinary theft by the direct confrontation element: the taking must occur on or about the victim's person and must be compelled through violence or intimidation.

Robbery is a crime against both property and person, which is why it carries substantially heavier penalties than larceny. The victim must be present and the force or fear must be the mechanism by which the property is taken — not merely incidental to it.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The act or practice of robbing; the offense of taking or attempting to take the property of another by force or threat of force."

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act or practice of robbing; theft."

The common usage is broader and looser than the legal definition. Ordinary speech treats "robbery" and "theft" as near-synonyms — people routinely say they were "robbed" when a burglar entered their home while they were away, or when a pickpocket lifted their wallet. Legally, neither event is robbery. Burglary requires entry into a structure; pickpocketing, if the victim is unaware and no force is used, is larceny. Robbery requires the victim's presence, awareness, and subjection to force or fear. The distinction matters enormously in criminal classification, charging decisions, and sentencing exposure.

Core Elements

The elements of robbery, as synthesized across jurisdictions:

A taking — actual or constructive removal of property from the victim's possession.
Personal property — traditionally limited to tangible goods and money; some modern statutes extend this.
From the person or immediate presence — the property must be on the victim or within their area of control at the time of the taking.
Against the victim's will — consent, even coerced consent, is absent.
By force or fear — force means actual physical violence; fear means putting the victim in reasonable apprehension of harm. The force or fear must cause or accompany the taking, not follow it.
With felonious intent — the taking must be with intent to permanently deprive.

The "immediate presence" element is often litigated. Courts have held that property located in an adjacent room, a nearby vehicle, or within the victim's line of sight can qualify if the victim is being restrained or threatened.

Recognized Forms

/SUBTYPES

Simple robbery: Taking by force or fear without additional aggravating factors. The baseline offense in most penal codes.

Aggravated robbery: Robbery accompanied by use of a deadly weapon, infliction of serious bodily injury, commission by multiple offenders, or targeting of a protected class (e.g., elderly victims). Carries elevated penalties in virtually all jurisdictions.

Armed robbery: A specific form of aggravated robbery defined by the use or display of a weapon — typically a firearm or deadly instrument. Many jurisdictions treat this as a distinct statutory offense with mandatory minimum sentences. See criminal_41.

Carjacking: Taking of a motor vehicle from a person by force or fear. Federally codified and separately charged in most states. Distinguished from robbery primarily by the subject matter of the taking. See criminal_41.

Why It Matters in Research

Corpus researchers face two primary traps with robbery.

The first is the theft-robbery conflation in older sources. Pre-20th-century legal texts, newspaper archives, and even some court opinions use "robbery" loosely to describe any unlawful taking. When reading 19th-century records — criminal indictments, legislative debates, newspaper accounts of crime — verify whether the actual charge or conduct involved force and presence. A document describing a "robbery" may be describing larceny, burglary, or embezzlement by modern classification.

The second trap is the evolving statutory architecture. At common law, robbery was a unitary offense. Modern penal codes have fractured it into tiered degrees (first-degree, second-degree) and distinct offenses (armed robbery, carjacking, home invasion robbery). When researching sentencing, charging practices, or comparative crime statistics across time periods or jurisdictions, these category changes make direct comparison unreliable without checking the underlying statutory definitions in effect at the relevant time.

Researchers working on the constitutional dimensions of robbery statutes — particularly vagueness challenges to "fear" or "immediate presence" elements — should connect to the larceny and assault entries, as courts often reason by analogy across these overlapping offenses.

Robbery's dual character as a crime against property and person also generates interesting corpus connections: it appears in both property crime scholarship and violent crime literature, and sits at the intersection of Fourth Amendment (stop-and-frisk predicated on robbery suspicion), Sixth Amendment (jury trial rights for felonies), and Eighth Amendment (proportionality of mandatory minimums) research threads.

Historical Dictionary Support

The historical sources converge on the core definition with unusual consistency. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's all center on the same triad: felonious taking, from the person, by force or fear. Blackstone's formulation (4 Bl. Comm. 242-243) anchors all of them, and Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown appears in Black's as secondary authority — both are genuine sources.

Bouvier's adds the useful specification "to any value," reflecting the common law rule that robbery's gravity derived from the confrontational nature of the taking, not the worth of what was taken. A penny taken at knifepoint was robbery; a thousand pounds taken from an unattended carriage was not.

Burrill's is notable for tracing the term's etymology through Law French (robberie) and Medieval Latin (robaria, roberia) back to the Latin rapina — a word also underlying modern "rapine" and "rape" in their archaic property-taking sense. This etymological lineage signals the deep connection between robbery and concepts of violent seizure, useful background for researchers working on early common law sources.

Anderson's Dictionary of Law entry retrieved under this term is clearly a misfire — the text describes "road" and is irrelevant to robbery. Researchers using Anderson's should note that index and retrieval errors in digitized historical dictionaries are not uncommon; always verify that retrieved text matches the target headword.

None of the historical sources address aggravated robbery or carjacking as distinct categories, because these statutory refinements largely postdate the compilation of these dictionaries. Modern statutory robbery law has grown substantially beyond what any of these sources describe.

Jurisdictional Note

Most states follow a tiered degree structure for robbery, with weapon use or bodily injury elevating the offense to a higher degree carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Federal law addresses robbery in specific contexts (bank robbery under 18 U.S.C. § 2113; carjacking under 18 U.S.C. § 2119) rather than as a general offense. A handful of states retain a unitary robbery statute without formal degrees, relying on sentencing factors rather than separate charges to address aggravation.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

criminal_40: Robbery — Elements and Degrees (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
criminal_41: Armed Robbery and Carjacking (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)

ROBBERYmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

Robbery is the felonious taking of personal property in the possession of another, from his person or immediate presence, and against his will, accomplished by means of force or fear. Pen. Code Cal. § 211; 1 Hawk. P. C. 25; 4 Bl. Comm. 243; 3 Wash. C. C. 209; 15 Ind. 288; 16 Miss. 401. Robbery is the wrongful, fraudulent, and violent taking of money, goods, or chattels, from the person of another by force or in- timidation, without the consent of the own- Code Ga. 1882, § 4389. er. Robbery is where a person, either with violence or with threats of injury, and put- ting the person robbed in fear, takes and carries away a thing which is on the body, or in the immediate presence of the person from whom it is taken, under such circum- stances that, in the absence of violence or threats, the act committed would be a theft. Steph. Crim. Dig. 208; 2 Russ. Crimes, 78.

ROBBERYmain

Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910

Robbery is the felonious taking of personal property in the possession of another, from his person or immediate ’ presence, and against his will, accomplished - by means of force or fear. Pen. Code Cal. §.211; 1 Hawk. P. C. 25; 4 Bl. Comm. 243; United States v. Jones, 3 Wash. ©. ©. 209, Fed. Cas. No. 15,494; Seymour v. State, 15 Ind, 288;, McDaniel v. State, 16 Miss, 401, 47 Am. Dec. 93. - Robbery is the wrongful, fraudulent, and violent taking of money, goods, or chattels, from the person of another by force or intimidation, without the consent of the owner. Code Ga. 1882, § 4889. Robbery is where a person, either with violence or with threats of injury, and -putting the person robbed in fear, takes and carries away a thing which is on the body, or in the immediate presence of the person from whom it is taken,.under such circum. stances that, in the absence of violence or threats, the act committed would be a theft. Steph. Crim. Dig. 208; 2 Russ. Crimes, 78. And see, further, State v. Osborne, 116 Iowa, 479, 89 N. W. 1077; In re Coffey, 128 Cal. 522, 56 Pac. 448; Matthews v. State, 4 Ohio St. 540; ‘Benson v. McMahon, 127 U.. 8. 457, 8 Sup. Ct. 1240, 832 L. Ed. 234: State v. McGinnis, 158 Mo. 105, 59 8. W. 8&3: State v. Burke, 73 N. C. 87; Reardon v. State, 4 Tex. App. 610; Houston v. Com., 87 Va. 257, 12 S. E. 385; Thomas v. State, 91 Ala. 34, 9 South. 81; Hickey v. State, 23 Ind. 22. . —Highwa ] Ma hadag eid Ae In criminal law. The crime of ro committed upon or near a public hans State v. Brown, 113 N. C. 18 S. E. 51. In England, by St. 23 Hen. VIIE ce. 1, this was made felony without benefit of clergy, while dacaer td committed elsewhere was less severely punished. The distinction was apaene? by St. 8 & 4 W. & M. c. 9, -and in is country it has never prevailed generally. ROBE. Fr. A word anciently used by Sailors for the cargo of a ship. The Italian “roba” had the same meaning.

ROBBERYmain

Anderson's Dictionary of Law • 1890

$ Has never been defined to mean land: it is difficult to find a definition which does not include the sense of "way," though the latter word is more generic, referring to many things besides roads. "Road" is generally applied to a highway, street, or lane, often to a path-way or private way, yet strictly it means only one particular kind of way.1 May refer to a traveled place or track, without regard to the nature of the user, or to the question of any right thereto in the public.2 By-road. An obscure or neighborhood road, not used to a great extent by the public, yet so far a public road that the public have, of right, free access to it at all times. 3 Plank-road; turnpike road. See TURN- Open and violent larceny from the person; the felonious and forcible taking from the person of another of goods or money to any value, by violence or putting him in fear.7 The felonious taking of goods from the person of another, or in his presence, by vioNorthern Transportation Co. v. Chicago, 99 U. S. 641-44 (1878), cases, Strong, J. 2 Pumpelly v. Green Bay Co., 13 Wall. 180-81 (1871), Swayne, J. 3 Grier v. Sampson, 27 Pa. 192 (1856). * Beach v. Parmeter, 23 Pa. 197 (1854). See also Dudley v. Bolles, 24 Wend. *465 (1840); Parker v. Adams, 12 Metc. 417 (1847), cases; Story, Bailm. § 599. 5 Simons v. Gaynor, 89 Ind. 166 (1883). The Everman, 2 Hughes, 28 (1874); 7 Ex. 734. 74 Bl. Com. 241.

ROBBERYn.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

The act or practice of robbing; theft. Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves. Shak. The crime of robbing. See Rob, v. t., 2.

robberynoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.

The act or practice of robbing. | The offense of taking or attempting to take the property of another by force or threat of force.

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