in Law, is a high offence, where a person in a judicial station takes any fee, gift, reward, or brokerage for doing his office, except of the king. But, taken largely, it signifies the receiving or offering any undue reward to or by any person concerned in the administration of public justice, whether judge, officer, or other, to act contrary to his duty; and sometimes it signifies the taking or giving of a reward for public office.

In the East it is the custom never to petition any superior for justice, not excepting their kings, without a present. This is calculated for the genius of despotic countries, where the true principles of government are not understood, and it is imagined that there is no obligation due from the superior to the inferior, no relative duty owing from the governor to the governed. The Roman law, though it contained many severe injunctions against bribery, as well for selling a man's vote in the senate or other public assembly, as for the bartering of common justice, yet, by a strange indulgence in one instance, it tacitly encouraged this practice, by allowing the magistrate to receive small presents, provided they did not on the whole exceed a hundred crowns a year; not considering the insinuating nature and gigantic progress of this vice, when once admitted. Plato, therefore, in his ideal republic, orders those who take presents for doing their duty to be punished in the severest manner; and by the laws of Athens, he who offered a bribe was prosecuted, as well as he who received it. In England this offence of taking bribes is punished, in inferior officers, with fine and imprisonment; and in those who offer a bribe, though it be not taken, the same. But in judges, especially the superior ones, it has always been looked upon as so heinous an offence, that Chief Justice Thorpe was hanged for it in the reign of Edward III. By a statute 11 Henry IV. it was enacted that all judges and officers of the king convicted of bribery should forfeit triple the bribe, be punished at the king's will, and be discharged from his service for ever.