Lynch Law, the summary trial and punishment of offenders by private and unauthorised persons. This mode of administering justice has been necessarily employed in countries newly settled, where the power of the civil government is not yet sufficiently established. The frequency with which it has been resorted to in the southern and western states of the American Union, however, as a punishment for serious criminal offences, is to be referred rather to a doubt on the part of the mob as to the adequacy of the ordinary legal machinery. In the six years 1884-89 the number of murders in the United States was reported as 14,770, of legal executions 558, and of lynchings 975. Of course, the infliction of any minor punishment without legal trial constitutes lynch law (see VIGILANCE SOCIETIES), but the simple term 'lynching' usually implies capital punishment.—The phrase has been variously traced to a Virginia soldier and to a Virginia farmer of that name, to one Lynch who was sent out from England about 1687 to suppress piracy, and to a mayor of Galway (q.v.) in Ireland; while yet another tradition refers it to Lynch Creek, in North Carolina, where the forms of a court-martial and execution were gone through over the lifeless body of a Tory, who had already been precipitately hanged to prevent a rescue.