A civil wrong or wrong is a cause of action under civil law. Types include

tort A tort is a civil wrong, other than breach of contract, that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with cri ...

, breach of contract and breach of trust. Something that amounts to a civil wrong is wrongful. A wrong involves the violation of a

right Rights are law, legal, social, or ethics, ethical principles of freedom or Entitlement (fair division), entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal sy ...

because wrong and right are contrasting terms. An 1860 legal ruling stated that: "It is essential to an action in tort that the act complained of should under the circumstances be legally wrongful as regards the party complaining; that is, it must prejudicially affect him in some legal right". The law that relates to civil wrongs is part of the branch of the law that is called the civil law. A civil wrong can be followed by civil proceedings. It is a misnomer to describe a civil wrong as a " civil offence". The law of England recognised the concept of a wrong before it recognised the distinction between civil wrongs and

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definiti ...

s in the 13th century.

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