From Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern Resilience

In The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature (Oxford 2024), Elise Wang explores the medieval origins and surprising modern resilience of “felony” in contemporary criminal law. Since its appearance as the ur-crime of Anglo-Saxon proto-criminal law, commentators, historians, and judges have waxed poetic about the radically exclusive evil attached to those who are branded, “attainted,” and just plain despised “with words of felony.” The following passage from Pollock & Maitland’s classic history of medieval English law gives a nice flavor:

"When the adjective felon first appears it seems to mean cruel, fierce, wicked, base. Occasionally we may hear in it a note of admiration, for fierceness may shade off into laudable courage; but in general it is as bad a word as you can give to man or thing, and it will stand equally well for many kinds of badness, for ferocity, cowardice, craft."

That’s memorably harsh, even for medieval law. More startling yet, talk of “felony” and “felons” survives to this day. Courts continue to quote the passage above to give their modern audience a flavor of what felony means today. In public discourse, the “branding” of a criminal defendant as a “felon”–as opposed to a mere “convict”–still appears as definitive evidence of that person’s (more or less permanent and total) exclusion from the political community, i.e., a type of civil death or outlawry (incl. disenfranchisement, deportation, and ineligibility for jobs, benefits, or privileges).

How can this be? What did felony mean in medieval law and literature? What does (and should?) it mean today? Does felony have a place in modern criminal law discourse and practice?

In this event, an interdisciplinary panel of commentators engages with Professor Wang’s book:

• Elise Wang (Cal State Fullerton, English) (author)
• Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Harvard, Law) (moderator)
• Sara Butler (Ohio State, History)
• Jennifer Jahner (Cal Tech, English)
• Alice Ristroph (Brooklyn Law School)
• Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr, English)

The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum (https://crimlrev.net). For additional materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources (“Felony”) (https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources/).

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