The Evolution of Compensatory Jurisprudence Globally

Long before modern courts, victim compensation funds, or constitutional rights, the question of what a crime victim is owed has been at the heart of every legal system ever devised. Today, we call the legal framework that addresses this question compensatory jurisprudence – the body of law and legal thinking concerned with making victims whole after they suffer harm. Its history spans millennia, crosses continents, and reflects a constant tug-of-war between two competing ideas: Is a crime primarily a wrong against an individual victim, or is it a wrong against society at large? The answer has changed dramatically over time, and that change has defined how legal systems treat victims of crime.

The earliest roots: vengeance and blood money
Mosaic law and the principle of proportional compensation
Ancient Greece and Rome: corrective justice takes shape
The Anglo-Saxon period: wergild and the price of a life
The shift away from victim compensation: state and ecclesiastical power
The 19th-century penal reform movement: bringing victims back
India’s place in this trajectory

The earliest roots: vengeance and blood money

In the earliest human societies, there were no courts, no state prosecutors, and no concept of a “public wrong.” If you were harmed, justice was a private matter. Victims or their families would seek vengeance directly against the wrongdoer – an approach that, predictably, led to cycles of retaliation and blood feuds. Over time, communities recognised that allowing unlimited private vengeance was destabilising. The solution was to put a price on harm.

One of the first formalised mechanisms was “blood money” – a monetary payment made by the offender (or their family) to the victim (or their family) in place of physical retaliation. Legal historians note that ancient practices of retaliation gradually evolved through recognisable phases into systems requiring victim compensation. The Hammurabi’s Code of ancient Mesopotamia (c. 1754 BCE) is among the earliest codified legal documents, containing provisions for compensation alongside its well-known principle of proportional retribution. The idea was simple but profound: harm must be matched with a corresponding remedy.

Ancient Hindu jurisprudence reflects a similar understanding. The Manusmriti required offenders to pay compensation and bear the costs of treatment when they caused bodily injury, and ancient texts like the Arthashastra further placed compensatory obligations within the framework of royal duty. If the king failed to recover stolen property for the victim, it was considered his duty to compensate the victim from the royal treasury – a remarkably early conception of state responsibility toward crime victims.

Mosaic law and the principle of proportional compensation

Mosaic law, as recorded in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, made a significant contribution to the evolution of compensation in legal thought. The famous principle of lex talionis – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” – is often misread as purely retributive. According to legal scholars, the Biblical lex talionis actually marked an important transition: it capped retaliation at a one-to-one ratio, replacing older customs that allowed disproportionate revenge. In practice, Mosaic law often permitted monetary compensation in lieu of physical punishment, especially in property offences and bodily harm, making it an early bridge between retributive and compensatory justice.

The principle served a practical function: it gave victims a recognised legal entitlement to a remedy, while the state (or community) set the terms of that remedy to prevent escalation. This dual character – protecting the victim while imposing order – is the foundational logic of compensatory jurisprudence.

Ancient Greece and Rome: corrective justice takes shape

The Greek and Roman legal traditions brought philosophical depth to the concept of victim compensation. Roman law recognised compensation for damage to persons or property through the Lex Aquilia, passed in the third century BCE, which established liability based on fault and gave injured parties a legal basis to claim monetary redress.

In ancient Athens, the legal system drew a distinction between public wrongs – crimes against the city-state – and private wrongs, which were primarily addressed through compensation to the victim. The philosopher Aristotle conceptualised what he called “corrective justice”: the idea that when one party suffers a loss caused by another, the law must act to restore equality between them. This notion – that justice is not just about punishing wrongdoers but about rebalancing the scales for those who have suffered – remains central to compensatory jurisprudence today.

Roman jurists refined this further by developing the concepts of dolus (intentional wrongdoing) and culpa (negligence), establishing that a wrongdoer’s mental state would affect the scope of their liability. These conceptual tools – fault, intent, and measurable harm – became the building blocks of civil liability and damage assessment in modern legal systems.

The Anglo-Saxon period: wergild and the price of a life

The Anglo-Saxon period in England (roughly the 5th to 11th centuries CE) represents one of the most elaborately structured experiments in compensatory justice in legal history. The centrepiece of this system was wergild (literally “man payment”) – a monetary value assigned to every free person’s life based on their social rank, to be paid as compensation to the victim’s family in the event of killing or serious injury.

The system was remarkably detailed. Anglo-Saxon law mandated compensation for specific injuries, with the amount determined by the injured body part. A broken nose, a severed finger, a lost foot – each had a tariff. In cases of homicide, the victim’s kin could forgo a blood feud in exchange for the payment of wergild. The law code of King Alfred in the late 9th century codified these provisions across a wide range of harms, from minor injuries to death.

Alongside wergild, Anglo-Saxon law recognised related instruments. Bot covered various types of compensation to victims for damages suffered, while wite was a separate fine paid to the king as an atonement for breach of the king’s peace. This dual structure is significant: it shows an early recognition that a single harmful act could generate two distinct obligations – one to the victim and one to the public authority. The harm to the victim and the disturbance of public order were treated as separate, though related, wrongs.

The earliest Anglo-Saxon law codes, some dating to the sixth century, enshrined these tariffs in writing, suggesting that compensation culture was not an invention of later legal reformers – it was a foundational feature of early English law.

The shift away from victim compensation: state and ecclesiastical power

The decline of direct victim compensation as a central feature of criminal law was gradual, but its drivers are clear: the growing power of both the state and the Church. As monarchies consolidated authority in medieval Europe, kings increasingly framed crimes not just as wrongs against individuals but as offences against the sovereign’s peace. This reframing had a decisive consequence – the financial proceeds of criminal proceedings flowed to the crown, not to the victim.

During the 10th and 11th centuries, certain crimes became no longer expiable by compensation; criminals, particularly in cases of felony, were instead punished by local authorities, usually by death or mutilation. The Church reinforced this shift by developing its own courts and a theology of punishment centred on moral atonement, sin, and penance. Ecclesiastical jurisdiction over crimes of morality further displaced the victim from the centre of the justice process.

By the time common law had crystallised in England under the 12th and 13th century Angevin kings, criminal procedure had become almost entirely state-driven. The criminal law became offender-oriented, and the suffering of the victim was often overlooked – their only recourse was a separate civil action for damages, which was costly, slow, and practically inaccessible to most ordinary people. The movement from compensatory remedies back toward retributive punishment continued with the emergence of common law, which shifted toward punishing criminal acts rather than compensating victims.

This is the period that criminologist Stephen Schafer described as the era of the victim’s “decline” – a long phase in which the state assumed the role of victim, prosecuting offenders on behalf of society, while the actual victim was reduced to a witness in proceedings that were not designed to serve their needs.

The 19th-century penal reform movement: bringing victims back

The tide began to turn with the great penal reform movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Enlightenment thinkers challenged the brutality and irrationality of existing punishments. Reformers like Cesare Beccaria, who argued that punishments should be proportional and purposeful, and Jeremy Bentham, who advanced utilitarian principles of deterrence, helped shift the philosophical ground on which criminal justice was built. Utilitarian reformers objected to the inconsistency of punishments and insisted that for deterrence to function, offenders and victims both needed to be considered within a rational system.

As the 19th century progressed, the rehabilitative ideal gained ground. The rise of criminological reformism between the 1870s and 1920s made rehabilitation the basis for rethinking the rationale of punishment, and alongside this came renewed attention to what victims were owed. If the purpose of criminal justice was not simply to punish but to repair social harm, then the harm suffered by victims could no longer be ignored.

The most influential figure in reviving the case for victim compensation was Margery Fry, a British prison reformer and one of the first women to serve as a magistrate in England. Fry campaigned for governments to establish systematic ways to compensate victims of crime, arguing that victims should receive at least as much attention as offenders. She viewed state compensation as a way of addressing the social disequilibrium created by crime. Her advocacy directly influenced the establishment of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in the United Kingdom in 1964 – the first modern state-run victim compensation scheme of its kind.

The 20th century saw this momentum grow internationally. After the Second World War, criminologists took up the task of studying the criminal-victim relationship more seriously, and their efforts eventually led to the United Nations passing a charter for victims’ rights and the European Convention on the Compensation of Victims of Violent Crime. Victim compensation had come full circle – from a foundational principle of ancient law, through centuries of marginalisation, to a recognised right under international frameworks.

India’s place in this trajectory

India’s legal history mirrors many of these global trends. Ancient Hindu law placed compensatory obligations on the offender and, in some cases, on the king himself. In the ancient Sutra period, awarding compensation was treated as a royal right, and the Manusmriti required offenders to compensate victims and cover the expenses of their treatment. Colonial-era criminal law, however, followed the British model of state-centred prosecution, sidelining victims in much the same way as in England.

The modern revival in India has come primarily through judicial intervention. The Supreme Court’s landmark directions in cases like Delhi Domestic Working Women’s Forum v. Union of India and Ankush Shivaji Gaikwad v. State of Maharashtra have progressively established that courts have not just the power but the duty to consider victim compensation in every criminal case. Section 357 of the Code of Criminal Procedure confers a power coupled with a duty on courts to ensure fair and reasonable compensation to victims. Recent legislative developments – from the Motor Vehicles Amendment Act, 2019, which raised compensation caps in hit-and-run cases, to provisions for interim compensation in sexual assault matters – reflect a legal system gradually catching up with the historical imperative to treat victim redress as central to justice, not peripheral to it.

What do you think? Across millennia, the victim has moved from the centre of the justice process to its margins, and is now being brought back – but is the pace of this change fast enough in the Indian context? And given that ancient legal systems, from Anglo-Saxon England to Manu’s India, treated direct victim compensation as a fundamental principle, does the modern state model of criminal justice – where the victim is often just a witness – represent genuine progress, or a step backward?

References

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Table of Contents

The earliest roots: vengeance and blood money 🔗

Mosaic law and the principle of proportional compensation 🔗

Ancient Greece and Rome: corrective justice takes shape 🔗

The Anglo-Saxon period: wergild and the price of a life 🔗

The shift away from victim compensation: state and ecclesiastical power 🔗

The 19th-century penal reform movement: bringing victims back 🔗

India’s place in this trajectory 🔗