Definition of "Draconian"

As to the details of the Draconian constitution, it is certainly surprising to find so many institutions and offices referred to, which had hitherto been only known to exist at a later date.

1892, F. G. Kenyon, editor, Αθηναιων Πολιτεια: Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens, page 12

Not a line of the Draconian laws has been preserved in their original form.

1893, John Clark Ridpath, Great Races of Mankind: An Account of the Ethnic Origin, Primitive Estate, Early Migrations, Social Evolution, and Present Conditions and Promise of the Principal Families of Men […], volume III, Cincinnati, Ohio: The Jones Brothers Publishing Company, page 154

Aristotle, Constit., 3, 6 (speaking of the pre-Draconian age): […]

1918, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register, page 348

The board of fifty-one “jurors” mentioned in connection with the code seems, in Adcock’s opinion, to constitute a new Draconian court.

1972, Frank N[orthen] Magill, E. G. Weltin, editors, Great Events from History: Ancient and Medieval Series, volumes I (4000 - 1 B.C.), Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, Incorporated, page 155

This table was probably a Solonian preface or preamble to the Draconian laws: its provisions embody the changes that followed from Solon’s reforms.

1998, Edwin Carawan, Rhetoric and the Law of Draco, Oxford: Clarendon Press, published 2004, page 91

This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy?

1839, Edgar Allan Poe, William Wilson‎

Cow killing in Cashmere is punished as a worse crime than homicide! Travellers to Cashmere in those days — entering the valley by the Shupeyon route — will perhaps remember the skeleton of a man hanging in rusty chains from a prominent bough of the first large tree which met the eye on emerging from the Heerpore pass. That wretch was hanged for vaccicide…a terrible example of Maharajah Golaub Sing’s Draconian laws!

1887, David John Falconer Newall, The Highlands of India II: Field Sports and Travel in India, sect. i, ch. iv, p. 49

[T]o enact a Draconian law that if anybody who does not know anything about the subject thinks when you are trying to get a bullock into a truck when he will not go you are acting cruelly he can inform the police, and you can be arrested there and then and hauled up before a Justice of the Peace.

1908 August 6, William Herbert Herries, “Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Bill”, in New Zealand. Parliamentary Debates. Fourth Session, Sixteenth Parliament (House of Representatives), volume 144, Wellington: John Mackay, government printer, page 188, column 1

"They have effectively put a gun to our head and said if we don't accept their proposal they will impose a more Draconian contract."

2007 December 21, Rebecca Smith, “Gordon Brown 'to force GPs to work evenings'”, in Telegraph, UK, retrieved 27 November 2018

Perhaps lessons had already been learned from the Draconian infrastructure cuts on the Waterloo-Exeter route.

2020 April 8, Howard Johnston, “East-ended? When the ECML was at risk”, in Rail, page 65