Legal Definition and Related Resources of Lynch law

a common phrase used to express the vengeance of a mob inflicting an injury and committing an outrage upon a person suspected of some oifense. In England this is called “Lidford Law.” See also “Jedburgh Justice.”

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This definition of Lynch Law Is based on the The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary . This entry needs to be proofread.

Vocabularies (Semantic Web Information)

noun

• anarchy
• blatant violation of law
• breakdown of administration
• disorderliness
• flagrant abuse of the law
• illegal infliction of punishment
• lack of due process
• lack of justice
• lack of legal sanction
• lawlessness
• misgovernment
• misrule
• mob rule
• mobocracy
• nihilism
• ochlocracy
• outlawry
• paralysis of authority
• punishment without trial
• reign of terror
• summary punishment by mob
• taking the law in one’s own hands
• terrorism
• unruliness

Lynch Law in the Dictionary of Law consisting of Judicial Definitions and Explanations of Words, Phrases and Maxims

The action of private individuals, organized bodies of men, or disorderly mobs, who, without legal authority, punish by hanging, or otherwise, real or suspected criminals, without trial according to the forms of law. American lexicographers refer to the origin of the term to the practice, in the seventeenth century, of a Virginia farmer named Lynch. Others trace it to the act of one Lynch, mayor and warden of Galway, Ireland, in 1493, who “hanged his own son out of the window for defrauding and killing strangers, without martial or common law.” Others, again, trace it to the Anglo-Saxon, linch, to beat with a club, to chastise.

Note: This legal definition of Lynch Law in the Dictionary of Law (English and American Jurisprudence) is from 1893.