Definition
The intentional and voluntary destruction of one's own life by a person of sound mind and sufficient mental capacity. Two distinct but related senses operate in legal contexts:
1. Criminal/Common Law Sense. At common law, suicide was classified as a felony — specifically, as felonia de se (felony against oneself). A person who died by suicide forfeited property to the Crown and was denied Christian burial. This characterization required that the act be deliberate, intentional, and committed by a person in possession of their mental faculties. Self-killing by a person who lacked mental capacity was not suicide at common law; it was treated as a misfortune, not a crime.
2. Insurance Law Sense. Whether a death constitutes "suicide" within the meaning of a life insurance exclusion clause is a distinct legal question, heavily litigated in American courts. The majority rule construes "suicide," "die by his own hand," or similar policy language to require a voluntary, intentional act of self-destruction with awareness of its fatal nature. Deaths caused by insanity, delirium, or involuntary compulsion generally fall outside the suicide exclusion under this construction, though courts have not been uniform.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of intentionally killing oneself; also used figuratively for self-destructive actions unlikely to cause literal death (e.g., "political suicide"), or informally for a mixed fountain drink.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally; self-murder; in law specifically, the felonious killing of one's self by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind.
The legal and common meanings tracked each other closely through the nineteenth century, when both treated suicide as inherently criminal. The gap opened in the twentieth century: criminal liability for attempted suicide was progressively abolished across American jurisdictions, and assisted suicide became a distinct legal category with its own constitutional dimensions. Today the common meaning carries no criminal connotation; the legal meaning varies sharply by context (insurance, criminal, constitutional, medical).
Common Confusion
SUICIDE vs. ASSISTED SUICIDE: Suicide, in the traditional legal sense, refers to self-administered, self-directed death. Assisted suicide involves a third party who provides the means or direct assistance for another to end their life. These are legally distinct. The line matters for criminal liability of the assisting party, for insurance exclusion analysis, and for constitutional doctrine under the Due Process Clause.
SUICIDE vs. EUTHANASIA: Euthanasia involves a third party actively administering a lethal act to another, typically without the person self-administering. Suicide and euthanasia share the aim of death but differ in agency — a distinction that drives separate statutory treatment and constitutional analysis in physician-assisted death cases.
SUICIDE vs. FELONIA DE SE: Felonia de se is the specific common law term for the criminal act of self-killing. Suicide is the broader modern term; felonia de se carries the specific historical weight of forfeiture, attainder, and penal burial. The terms are related but not interchangeable when reading historical materials.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Felonia de se: The common law felony form of suicide, requiring deliberateness and sound mind. Property forfeiture attached.
Suicide by insanity: Self-killing while in a state of mental disease or delirium; not classified as criminal suicide at common law or under most insurance constructions.
Assisted suicide: A third party provides means or aid to a person who completes the final act. Legislatively and constitutionally regulated separately from self-administered suicide.
Physician-assisted suicide: Assisted suicide where the assisting party is a licensed medical professional; subject to distinct statutory schemes (e.g., "death with dignity" legislation) and constitutional analysis.
Why It Matters in Research
The criminal character of suicide is the defining historical trap. Sources through the late nineteenth century treat suicide as a felony, and researchers reading insurance cases, criminal law treatises, or probate materials from that era must account for the legal consequences that flowed from that classification — forfeiture, burial restrictions, and the express exclusion of insane self-killers from the felony category. That same exclusion is the doctrinal ancestor of the insurance law majority rule, which remains relevant today.
Insurance cases are the dominant litigation context in American legal materials from roughly 1850 through the twentieth century. Bouvier's makes clear that American courts generally limited suicide exclusions to volitional, mentally competent acts — but the Supreme Court recognized a competing rule allowing exclusions to reach all self-destruction regardless of mental state. Researchers encountering insurance suicide cases must identify which construction the jurisdiction applied, and whether policy language controls over background legal definition.
The constitutional dimension of suicide is almost entirely a late-twentieth-century development. Pre-1990 legal dictionaries and encyclopedias carry no meaningful discussion of a "right to die." Researchers working in that space should expect no support from the historical dictionary shelf and should turn to constitutional law materials directly.
The term also appears in unexpected contexts — Anderson's flags "suicide" as applied metaphorically to legal instruments that defeat their own purposes (a decree that adds a cloud to title rather than removing one). This secondary usage appears in equity materials and should not be misread as referencing actual self-destruction.
Historical Dictionary Support
The major dictionary sources agree on the core definition: deliberateness, intent, and mental capacity are necessary elements. Burrill is the most complete, explicitly linking suicide to felonia de se, citing Blackstone (4 Bl. Com. 189), and distinguishing the criminal form from the insanity exception. Black's (both editions) pairs two formulations — the volitional/intent test and the mental-faculty test — making clear these are complementary rather than competing standards.
Bouvier's, characteristically, extends the discussion furthest into the ambiguous territory: the extended passage on impulsive insanity, compulsion at precipices, and the psychology of children who end their lives after minor reproofs reflects the late-nineteenth-century legal system's struggle to fit emerging psychiatric categories into the binary of criminal/non-criminal self-killing. This is not merely historical curiosity — it is the doctrinal pressure that produced divergent insurance constructions.
What the historical dictionaries miss almost entirely: the modern constitutional framework around physician-assisted suicide and the right to die, the statutory death-with-dignity legislation enacted in several states, and any treatment of suicide as a public health rather than criminal matter. Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is not relevant (the source material retrieved concerns sufferentia pacis, not suicide).
Jurisdictional Note
Criminal liability for attempted suicide has been abolished in all American states, though the timing varied and some states retained it on the books into the latter half of the twentieth century. A minority of states retain felony or misdemeanor liability for aiding or encouraging suicide by means other than direct assistance. Physician-assisted suicide is legal and regulated in a number of states under death-with-dignity statutes; it remains criminally prohibited in others.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Homicide — Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia)
The Right to Die and Physician-Assisted Suicide (Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)