Mala Prohibita
Definition
An act that is wrong only because a statute prohibits it, such as jaywalking or unlicensed fishing. Remove the statute and the wrongness disappears.
Related terms
- Criminalisation
- The formal process by which a legislature converts a previously lawful or merely deviant act into a criminal offence, typically by enacting...
- Legalistic Definition of Crime
- Sutherland's definition: crime is behaviour prohibited by the state as injurious to the state, punishable by law. It ties the concept of...
- Mala in Se
- An act treated as inherently wrong in itself, such as murder or rape, independent of whether a statute names it. The wrongness...
- Moral Panic
- A period of intense, media-driven public anxiety about a group or behaviour perceived as an exceptional threat to social order. Coined by...
- Social Construction of Crime
- The view that what counts as criminal is not fixed by nature but produced through social, political and historical processes, so the...
- Consensus vs Conflict View of Law
- Two theoretical accounts of who defines crime: consensus sees law as codifying shared values, conflict sees it as reflecting the interests of...
- Normative Definition of Crime
- The social or sociological view that treats crime as one instance of the wider category of deviance, conduct that violates a group's...
Explained in these topics
- Crime, Deviance and the Limits of Criminalisation
- Crime vs Deviance: Legal and Social Definitions (Unit I)An act that is wrong only because a rule forbids it, such as a licensing or traffic offence. Remove the rule and no independent wrong remains.