Riot
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a disturbance of the public peace, attended with circumstances of tumults and commotion, as where an assembly destroys, or in any manner damages, seizes, or invades private or public property, or does any injury whatever by actual or threatened violence to the persons of individuals. By the common law a riot is an unlawful assembly of three or more persons which has actually begun to execute the common purpose for which it assembled by a breach of the peace, and to the terror of the public. A lawful assembly may become a riot if the persons assembled form and proceed to execute an unlawful purpose to the terror of the people, though they had not that purpose when they assembled. In England, every person convicted of riot is liable to be sentenced to hard labor. In Scotch law rioting is termed mobbing. A person may be guilty of mobbing who directs or excites a mob though he is not actually present in it. Mere presence without participation may constitute mobbing. By an act of George I., called the Riot Act, whenever 12 or more persons are unlawfully assembled to the disturbance of the peace, it is the duty of the justices of the peace, and the sheriff and under-sheriff of the county, or of the mayor or other head officers of a city or town corporate, to command them by proclamation to disperse. And all persons who continue unlawfully together for one hour after the proclamation was made, commit a felony and are liable to penal servitude or imprisonment. Most, if not all, of the States of the American Union have riot acts somewhat similar to those of England, and the common law governs where no statutes have been enacted.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The legal machinery Collier's described in 1921 has been dismantled almost piece by piece. The Riot Act of George I, under which magistrates proclaimed that twelve or more persons must disperse within the hour, was repealed in England in 1967, and the common-law offences of riot and unlawful assembly that Collier's defined were abolished by the Public Order Act 1986, which recast riot as a statutory offence needing twelve or more people using unlawful violence for a common purpose, punishable by up to ten years. The sentence of hard labour, which Collier's says every convicted rioter was liable to, was abolished in England in 1948. In the United States, where Collier's noted that state riot acts and the common law governed, Congress added a federal Anti-Riot Act in 1968 penalising interstate travel to incite a riot, tested soon afterwards in the Chicago conspiracy trial; Scots law still calls the offence mobbing, much as the entry says.
Written for this edition, 2026.