What Is the Difference Between Civil and Criminal Law?

In a criminal case the state prosecutes. Even when there is an individual victim, the case is brought in the name of the public, which is why criminal cases carry titles referring to the state or the crown rather than the victim's name.

In a civil case a private party sues another. That party might be a person, a company or even a government acting in its ordinary capacity. The victim of a crime does not decide whether a prosecution happens, but they can usually bring a civil claim regardless.

This is the most consequential difference. Criminal cases require proof beyond reasonable doubt, an intentionally demanding standard reflecting how serious the consequences are.

Civil cases usually require proof on the balance of probabilities, meaning more likely than not. That is a much lower bar. It is entirely possible to be acquitted of a crime and then lose a civil case arising from the same events, which is not a contradiction but a difference in what had to be proved.

The outcomes are different in kind rather than degree:

• •Criminal: fines paid to the state, community orders, or imprisonment
• •Criminal: a permanent record affecting employment and travel
• •Civil: damages paid to the other party as compensation
• •Civil: injunctions ordering someone to do or stop doing something
• •Civil: no criminal record and normally no imprisonment

A single incident can generate both types of case. A dangerous driver may face criminal prosecution by the state and a civil claim from the injured person seeking compensation.

The two proceed separately, with different standards and different aims. Criminal law is concerned with punishment and deterrence on behalf of society. Civil law is concerned with putting the wronged party back into the position they would have been in.

Legal representation differs. In serious criminal cases most systems guarantee a lawyer regardless of ability to pay, because liberty is at stake. In civil cases you generally pay your own way, which is why access to justice is a persistent concern in civil matters.

Terminology differs too. Criminal cases involve a defendant who is convicted or acquitted. Civil cases involve a claimant and a defendant, and one party is found liable rather than guilty. Using guilty about a civil case is a common but meaningful error.

Trials are the exception rather than the rule in both systems. The overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas, often following negotiation about charges or sentence, and the proportion reaching a full contested trial is small.

Civil cases follow a similar pattern, with most settling before reaching a courtroom, since litigation is expensive and outcomes are uncertain. This means the adversarial trial that dominates public imagination is statistically unusual, and reforms aimed at trials alone miss where most of the system's decisions are actually made.

The phrase civil law causes confusion because it has two separate meanings. In this article it means the branch of law dealing with private disputes, as opposed to crimes. But civil law also names a whole legal tradition, the code based systems of continental Europe and elsewhere, as opposed to common law systems such as those of England or the United States. A civil law country still has criminal courts, so it helps to check which meaning a writer intends.

The line between the state and private parties is also less rigid than it first appears. In England and Wales, individuals and organisations can bring a private prosecution for a criminal offence, and some charities and companies do so regularly. Meanwhile, public bodies often use civil law, suing for unpaid money or seeking court orders. What decides whether a case is criminal or civil is the type of proceeding and its possible outcome, not simply who starts it.

The trials of the American former football star O. J. Simpson show the two systems working side by side. In 1995 a criminal jury acquitted him of murdering his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, because the prosecution had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. The families then brought a civil claim for wrongful death. In 1997 a civil jury found him liable and ordered him to pay millions of dollars in damages. The rule against being tried twice for the same crime did not apply, because a civil claim is not a prosecution.

Another difference lies in what must be shown about the defendant's state of mind. Most serious crimes require a guilty mind, which lawyers call mens rea: the person must have acted intentionally, knowingly or recklessly, depending on the offence. Many civil claims do not. In negligence, the question is usually whether someone fell below the standard of a reasonable person, even if they meant no harm at all. There are exceptions on both sides, such as strict liability offences where no guilty mind is needed, but the general contrast is useful.

The split between civil and criminal law was not always so sharp. In Anglo-Saxon England many serious harms, including killings, were settled by compensation paid to the victim or their family. The amount, called wergild, varied with the social rank of the person harmed, and paying it was meant to prevent revenge and feuding. After the Norman Conquest the crown increasingly treated serious wrongdoing as a breach of the king's peace. Such cases became pleas of the crown, tried in royal courts, and a convicted felon's property could be forfeited, so the authorities gained where the injured family had once been compensated.

Even so, prosecution stayed largely in private hands for centuries. Before professional police forces were created in the nineteenth century, a victim in England usually had to track down the suspect, gather witnesses and bring the prosecution personally, often at their own expense. The police gradually took over that work, and in England and Wales the Crown Prosecution Service began operating in 1986 to take over and review prosecutions started by the police. The neat modern picture, with the state as prosecutor and compensation left to the civil courts, is therefore a fairly recent arrangement built on much older ideas.

The neat division between punishment and compensation has some deliberate overlaps. In England and Wales, a criminal court that convicts someone can also make a compensation order, requiring the offender to pay the victim for injury, loss or damage caused by the offence. This spares the victim from bringing a separate civil claim for straightforward losses, and courts are expected to consider compensation whenever a victim has suffered harm. In the United States, criminal courts can similarly order restitution. The offender is still being sentenced by the state, but part of the sentence looks very like civil damages.

The overlap also runs the other way. Under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, authorities in the United Kingdom can use civil recovery to take property that they show, on the balance of probabilities, was obtained through crime, even when nobody has been convicted. Unexplained wealth orders, introduced in 2018, can require someone to explain how they paid for valuable assets. In the United States, civil asset forfeiture works on similar lines and is controversial, because property can be seized from people never charged with an offence. Critics argue that these tools use the lower civil standard to achieve results that feel like punishment.

Criminal law is brought by the state, requires proof beyond reasonable doubt and can result in punishment, while civil law is brought by a private party, requires only the balance of probabilities and results in compensation or orders.