Law Dictionary

lynch law

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.

Source : William C. Anderson, A Dictionary of Law (1893)

Language : English

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