Definition
Vicinage has two related but distinct legal meanings, one historical and one constitutional.
1. (General/Historical) A neighborhood, locality, or surrounding district; the area near or adjacent to a place. In this sense, vicinage means simply the vicinity — the geographic zone in which something occurs or from which something draws.
2. (Criminal Procedure) The county, district, or community where a crime was committed and from which a jury is to be drawn. In modern American law, vicinage is most precisely associated with the Sixth Amendment right to a jury drawn from the state and district where the crime was committed, as well as with common law traditions requiring that jurors have some connection to the locality of the offense.
3. (New Jersey Practice) A specific administrative unit of the New Jersey Superior Court system, consisting of one or more counties grouped together for judicial administration and venue assignment purposes.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A surrounding district or neighborhood; the people of a neighborhood; the state of living near something; also, the area from which jurors are drawn.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The place or places adjoining or near; neighborhood; vicinity; as, a jury must be of the vicinage." The term appears in literary contexts to describe a local community or nearby district.
The common meaning of vicinage — simply a neighborhood or nearby area — tracks the legal meaning closely enough that confusion rarely flows in that direction. The gap worth noting runs the other way: lawyers and researchers encountering vicinage in constitutional or criminal procedure contexts should understand it is not merely a synonym for "neighborhood" but carries a specific doctrinal freight about jury composition and the right to a locally drawn jury. The neighborhood meaning is the root; the jury-right meaning is the legal fruit.
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Common Confusion
Vicinage and venue are related but not interchangeable. Venue refers to the geographic location where a trial is held — a procedural question governed by statute and court rules, subject to transfer for convenience or prejudice. Vicinage refers to the community from which jurors are drawn — a constitutional question rooted in the Sixth Amendment and its antecedents. A court may properly transfer venue while still drawing jurors from the original vicinage, or may hold trial in the district of the offense while drawing a jury from elsewhere on change of venue. Researchers conflating the two will misread both constitutional arguments and procedural history. Bouvier's cross-reference to venue, while not wrong, understates this distinction.
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Why It Matters in Research
Vicinage is a term that evolved from a geographic descriptor into a constitutional term of art, and sources across the Law Mind corpus use it at different stages of that evolution. Researchers must be alert to which meaning is operative.
In early common law sources — including Blackstone and the materials Burrill and Black (1st ed.) rely on — vicinage means neighborhood in a broad, factual sense. The jury-of-the-vicinage requirement was a procedural tradition, not yet constitutional text. The shift matters enormously when reading founding-era materials: the Sixth Amendment guarantees a jury "of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed," but the phrase "of the vicinage" from the common law tradition was deliberately omitted from the final constitutional text after debate in the First Congress. Some founding-era arguments treated vicinage and district as synonymous; they are not, and courts have had to work through that gap.
When researching Sixth Amendment jury cases, expect vicinage arguments to appear in challenges to venue transfers, jury pool composition, and the scope of the constitutional guarantee. The term is largely absent from modern federal practice as a standalone term — the constitutional text governs — but it resurfaces in historical constitutional arguments, state constitutional provisions, and treatise discussions of jury rights.
For New Jersey researchers, vicinage carries a third, purely administrative meaning: it names the court subdivisions of the Superior Court, and New Jersey rules on venue, judicial assignment, and case transfer all use the term in this technical sense. This usage has no constitutional dimension and should not be read back into Sixth Amendment materials.
Historical sources in the Law Mind corpus (Bouvier, Burrill, Black's 2nd ed.) use the term primarily in its neighborhood and county-of-trial senses. None engages the constitutional debate over whether the Sixth Amendment incorporates the common law vicinage right. Researchers needing that analysis must move beyond the dictionary shelf to constitutional history sources and federal case law.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The four shelf sources present vicinage consistently as "neighborhood; near dwelling; vicinity," all tracing to Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Comm. 33) and Cowell's legal dictionary. This core definition is stable across all four sources and represents the term's common law baseline.
Black's 2nd edition adds the most useful gloss: "In modern usage, it means the county where a trial is had, a crime committed, etc." This signals the doctrinal narrowing that occurred as the term migrated from general geographic description to criminal procedure context, and the supporting case citations ground the shift in late nineteenth-century American authority.
Bouvier cross-references venue and jury, which correctly signals the jury-selection dimension but risks conflating vicinage with venue — a conflation the COMMON CONFUSION section addresses above.
Burrill provides etymology and the Blackstone citation but adds nothing beyond the baseline definition. None of the four sources address the Sixth Amendment debate over the omission of "vicinage" from the constitutional text, the distinction between vicinage and district, or the New Jersey administrative usage. Researchers should treat the historical dictionaries as reliable for the foundational meaning but incomplete for constitutional analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
Federal constitutional law uses district rather than vicinage as the operative term (U.S. Const. amend. VI), though the underlying concept is the same. Several state constitutions and common law traditions retain explicit vicinage language in their jury guarantees, making the term more constitutionally active in some state systems than in federal practice. New Jersey's usage as an administrative court division is sui generis and should not be imported into other jurisdictional contexts.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Sixth Amendment (jury trial guarantee and district requirement); Venue (procedural framework and transfer rules); Jury Selection (pool composition and constitutional constraints).
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