Definition
Sexual relation refers to conduct of a sexual nature between persons. In legal usage, the term carries two related but distinct meanings depending on context:
1. Relational status: The condition of living together as husband and wife, or cohabiting in a spousal-equivalent arrangement. In this sense, the term describes a recognized legal relationship rather than a specific act — one that historically triggered legal consequences for the parties, particularly regarding the man's liability on contracts entered by the woman and the presumption of paternity.
2. Physical conduct: Sexual intercourse or other intimate physical contact between persons. In this sense, the term appears in criminal statutes, evidentiary rules, and tort law to describe conduct that may be lawful (between consenting adults) or unlawful (as in rape, sexual assault, or statutory offenses).
The relational sense dominated nineteenth-century legal usage; the conduct sense dominates modern usage.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The behavior of a sexual nature between one or more individuals."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not include a discrete entry for "sexual relation" as a compound, treating it through the general definition of "relation" as a connection or standing between persons.
Editorial note: The common meaning focuses exclusively on physical or intimate behavior. The legal meaning, particularly in historical sources, often focuses instead on relational status — the ongoing legal condition created by cohabitation or marriage — which carries downstream consequences in contract, property, and evidence law entirely distinct from any specific act. A researcher reading a nineteenth-century case reference to "sexual relation" may be reading about legal liability, not about conduct.
Common Confusion
The relational and conduct senses of the term have been used interchangeably in both historical and modern sources, creating genuine interpretive ambiguity. A statute or case addressing "persons in a sexual relation" may be describing a class of persons defined by their cohabitation status, not describing a sexual act. Modern editors and indexers frequently collapse both senses into the conduct meaning, causing the relational-status dimension to disappear from secondary literature. Researchers should also distinguish "sexual relation" from "sexual relations" (plural), which in twentieth-century usage more commonly refers to acts, while the singular more often described the ongoing relational status in older authorities.
Why It Matters in Research
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is truncated in the source material — the definition runs into what appears to be entries for unrelated statutory terms ("SHALL BE," "SHALL BE ALLOWED," "SHALL BE LAWFUL"), suggesting a printing or digitization artifact. Researchers relying on this source should verify the full entry against a physical copy, as the substantive content of the definition may be incomplete.
The relational-status meaning carries significant historical research implications. In nineteenth-century common law, a woman's legal identity was substantially merged with her husband's under coverture. The recognition of a "sexual relation" — including informal cohabitation — affected who bore liability on contracts, whether a woman could sue or be sued independently, and how presumptions of paternity operated. Cases turning on whether a sexual relation existed are therefore often really about contractual capacity, property rights, or evidentiary presumptions rather than about sexual conduct per se.
In criminal law research, the term's conduct meaning is the operative one, but the specific acts encompassed have changed substantially by statute. Nineteenth-century criminal law often required penetration for the term to carry legal weight; modern statutes define covered conduct far more broadly. An index entry for "sexual relation" in a historical digest may point to cases that would today be treated under separate statutory headings for assault, battery, or specific enumerated offenses.
The term also appears in evidentiary contexts — particularly in the law of privilege and competency of witnesses — where the existence or non-existence of a marital or quasi-marital sexual relation determined whether a witness could be compelled to testify against a partner.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define sexual relation in terms of status — husband and wife, or persons cohabiting as such — and immediately pivot to its legal consequences: liability of the male on contracts, and probability of paternity. This framing is characteristic of late nineteenth-century American legal lexicography, which treated the term as a relational category generating legal incidents rather than as a description of conduct.
The entry's practical orientation toward contract liability and paternity presumption reflects the concerns of practitioners at the time: courts regularly had to determine whether a cohabiting couple's relationship was sufficient to trigger the legal rules ordinarily applicable to married persons. The entry offers no definition of what conduct constitutes the relationship, taking its existence as a factual matter to be established by evidence of cohabitation.
What historical dictionaries largely miss is any treatment of the term in criminal law, where even contemporaneous statutes were using related language. The conduct-focused meaning that dominates modern usage is essentially absent from nineteenth-century legal dictionaries, appearing instead in statutory text and case reporters rather than in lexicographic sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Modern criminal statutes have almost entirely replaced the common-law phrase "sexual relation" with specific defined terms (sexual contact, sexual penetration, sexual act, and similar formulations). Researchers working across jurisdictions should identify the operative statutory definition in each jurisdiction rather than assuming a uniform meaning from the common-law background.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Sexual Assault and Rape (Elements and Degrees) — The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia