Definition
To tempt, in legal contexts, means to induce, entice, or solicit another person toward a wrongful act — typically through persuasion, promise of reward, or deception. The term does not describe a standalone legal offense in modern law but functions as an operative verb in the doctrines of entrapment, solicitation, and criminal inducement. A person who tempts another toward crime may bear legal responsibility depending on the degree of inducement and whether the target was predisposed to commit the act.
The word appears most often in older common law texts describing the conduct of an agent provocateur, an accessory before the fact, or a party whose solicitation ripens into a completed offense. In entrapment doctrine specifically, the question of whether law enforcement "tempted" a defendant who lacked prior disposition is central to the defense.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To provoke someone to do wrong, especially by promising a reward; to entice. Also used more neutrally: to attract or allure.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To put to trial; to prove; to test; to try. Also, to lead or endeavor to lead into evil; to entice to what is wrong; to seduce.
Editorial note: The historical common meaning carried a notable theological dimension — tempting as a form of trial or testing, including testing God or being tested by the divine. Legal usage strips away this moral-theological layer entirely and focuses narrowly on the conduct of one party toward another. The Webster's 1913 sense of "to test or prove" has no counterpart in legal doctrine; the law concerns itself only with temptation as inducement toward wrongdoing.
Common Confusion
TEMPT vs. SOLICIT vs. ENTICE: These three words overlap substantially in both common and legal usage, and historical sources often use them interchangeably. In modern criminal law, solicitation is the formal offense; temptation and enticement are typically descriptive terms for the conduct underlying solicitation or entrapment claims. Entice carries particular weight in statutes targeting the luring of minors. Researchers should not assume that a historical source's use of "tempt" maps cleanly onto any single modern doctrine.
TEMPT vs. ENTRAPMENT: Entrapment is the defense; temptation or inducement by a government agent is the conduct that triggers it. Finding "tempt" in a historical opinion does not confirm an entrapment analysis — the doctrine had no settled name or form in early common law, and courts used tempt, entice, and decoy interchangeably without invoking entrapment as a recognized defense.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will rarely encounter TEMPT as a term of art in modern statutory or case law. Its importance is almost entirely historical and contextual. In nineteenth-century and earlier sources, tempt was used loosely across criminal law texts to describe conduct now sorted into distinct categories: solicitation, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and entrapment. A researcher reading older treatises must resist importing modern doctrinal precision onto that usage.
The entrapment connection is the most practically significant research pathway. Early American cases discussing whether an officer "tempted" a defendant into crime predate the formal articulation of the entrapment defense. Tracing that vocabulary forward into modern entrapment doctrine requires attention to the shift from moral language (temptation, seduction) to legal-structural language (predisposition, government inducement).
The term also surfaces in fraud and deceit contexts, where older opinions describe a party who "tempted" another into a transaction through misrepresentation. Here the word signals inducement as an element of fraud rather than criminal solicitation — a distinction easy to miss when reading across different areas of doctrine.
Anderson's and Bouvier's entries, as retrieved, do not directly address this term, which is itself informative: the absence confirms that TEMPT was not treated as a legal term of art even by comprehensive nineteenth-century dictionaries. It was vocabulary, not doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Neither Anderson's Dictionary of Law nor Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides a direct entry for TEMPT as a legal term. The Anderson's excerpt retrieved pertains to an unrelated entry on appearance or semblance. The Bouvier's excerpt concerns assault on a judge as contempt and criminal offense — also unrelated to this term.
This absence is consistent across other historical legal dictionaries. TEMPT was not dignified with its own entry because it was understood as ordinary English rather than legal terminology. Its legal significance was embedded within entries for related concepts: ENTRAPMENT, SOLICITATION, DECOY, ACCESSORY, and FRAUD. Researchers using historical dictionaries should search under those heads, not under TEMPT itself.
Webster's 1913 is more illuminating than either legal dictionary here. Its dual meanings — tempt as trial/test and tempt as inducement to evil — reflect a conceptual range that collapsed in legal usage. By the time American criminal law began systematizing entrapment doctrine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only the inducement sense survived in legal writing.
Jurisdictional Note
No jurisdiction treats TEMPT as a statutory term of art. Jurisdictional variation relevant to this term tracks variation in entrapment doctrine (objective vs. subjective tests) and in solicitation statutes, both of which differ significantly across U.S. states and between U.S. and English law.