What is a crime? The question has three classic answers, and the examination expects all three:
1. The legal-positivist definition (procedural): a crime is any act (or omission) prohibited by law and punishable by the State through criminal process — Blackstone: "an act committed or omitted in violation of a public law." The lawyer's working test: if the State prosecutes and the court may punish, it is a crime.
2. The moral/social definition: a crime is a public wrong — conduct that offends the shared moral conscience of the community and threatens social order. Sir William Stephen's formulation (a crime is "an act which is both forbidden by law and revolting to the moral sentiments of society").
3. The sanction-based definition (Austin): a crime is conduct for which the law provides punishment — the operative difference from civil wrongs being the kind of consequence (punishment, not compensation or restitution).
Nature of crime — four attributes to list:
• Public wrong: prosecuted by the State in the name of the people (the case title itself says so — Government of Nepal v. X, formerly His Majesty's Government v. X, as the prescribed NKP reports show);
• State sanction: punishable — imprisonment, fine, community service, or compensation-order hybrids under the Muluki Criminal Code, 2074's sentencing scheme;
• Moral condemnation (the criminologists' "criminal label"): conviction brands; criminal law is society's formal condemnation;
• Strict procedural regime: guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt through fair process — the Constitution of Nepal (2015), Article 20's criminal guarantees (presumption of innocence, no self-incrimination, fair hearing by an independent court — see Unit 3).
Crime as a social construct: what counts as crime varies across time and space — the criminalization decision (and decriminalization) is a political-moral choice: marital rape criminalized in Nepal only in 2002 (the 11th-amendment era reform (Jurisprudence-I, Semester 2)); witchcraft an offence once, superstition-criminalization (e.g., the Witchcraft Accusation (Crime and Punishment) Act's successors) a modern Nepali addition; gambling, alcohol and adultery illustrate the flux. This historicity does not make crime "unreal" — it makes criminal law the record of each society's enforced morality.