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An outlaw, a person living the lifestyle of outlawry, is most familiar to contemporary readers as a stock character in Western movies. The Western outlaw is typically a criminal who operates from a base in the wilderness, and makes periodic raids on civilized settlements. The stereotype owes a great deal to English folklore precedents, in the tales of Robin Hood and of gallant highwaymen. But outlawry was once a term of art in the law, and one of the harshest judgments that could be pronounced on anyone's head.

In common law, an outlaw was a person who had defied the laws of the realm, by such acts as ignoring a summons to court, or fleeing instead of appearing to plead when charged with a crimeSee crime fiction for a survey of the fictional treatment of crimes and their detection and criminals and their motives. Crime Lake is a lake between Ashton-under-Lyne and Failsworth in Greater Manchester in England. A crime is an act which violates a law. In the earlier law of Anglo-Saxon England, outlawry was also declared when a person committed a homicideThis article is about homicide, the killing of a human being. For information about the television series, see: Homicide: Life on the Street. Homicide is the killing of another human being by one or more others. In contrast, suicide is the self killing of and could not pay the were, the blood-money, due to the victim's kin.

To be declared an outlaw was to suffer a form of civil deathCivil death is a term that refers to the loss of all or almost all civil rights by a person due to a conviction for a felony or due to an act by the government of a country that results in the loss of civil rights. A prominent example of civil death is th. The outlaw was debarred from all civilised society. No one was allowed to give him food, shelter, or any other sort of support; to do so was to commit the crime of couthutlaugh, and to be in danger of the ban oneself. A person who encountered an outlaw was allowed, and indeed encouraged, to kill them; to do so was no murderMurder is the crime of causing the death of another human being, without lawful excuse, and with intent to kill them, or with intent to cause them grievous bodily harm. When an illegal death is not caused intentionally, but is caused by recklessness or ne. Because the outlaw has defied civil society, that society was quit of any obligations to the outlaw; outlaws had no civil rights, could not sue in any court on any cause of action, though they were themselves personally liable.

In the context of criminal lawCriminal law (also known as penal law is the body of law that regulates governmental sanctions (such as imprisonment and/or fines) as retaliation for crimes against the social order. The goal of this process is that of achieving criminal justice. Accordin, outlawry faded not so much by legal changes as by the greater population density of the country, which made it harder for wanted fugitives to evade capture; and by the international adoption of extraditionExtradition is a formal process by which a criminal suspect held by one government is handed over to another government for trial or, if the suspect has already been tried and found guilty, to serve his or her sentence. Extradition treaties The consensus pacts. In the civil context, outlawry became obsolescent in civil procedureCivil procedure is the written set of rules that sets out the process that courts will follow when hearing cases of a civil nature (a "civil action"). These rules explain how a lawsuit must be commenced, what kind of service of process is required, the ty by reforms that no longer required summoned defendants to appear and plead. Still, the possibility of being declared an outlaw for derelictions of civil duty continued to exist in English law until 1879 and in Scots law until the late 1940s.