One of the most important monuments of juridical-legal literature in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is the Statute (its three editions: 1529, 1566, 1588), the code of feudal law written in the “Rusian” language, which for several centuries was used as the chancery/office language in the country. This document is very important for research on the lexis and other linguistic aspects of 16th-century literary Belorussian and Ukrainian, because the lexical layer best reflects the GDL’s political, economic and cultural relations with other countries. The lexis of the Statute is thematically quite diverse, but the legal-juridical vocabulary in this code of feudal law is the richest. In the article, using the comparative method, the thematic-lexical cluster of words denoting or defining crimes, criminals and forms of punishment is analysed. The common features of this lexis, its specific traits and loanwords in the three editions are identified. The analysis shows that the Statute contains both common and specific words and terms naming various life situations, crimes, offenders and punishments. In the second (1566) and especially the third (1588) edition, which became more extensive due to new or supplementary articles, this thematic-lexical cluster was enriched with new terms, most often loanwords. From the point of view of origin, the lexis shows items inherited from Old Russian (often polysemous), from Old Belorussian and Ukrainian (with specific word-formation), as well as borrowings – mostly Polonisms, but also Polonism–Germanisms and Polonism–Latinisms. A distinctive feature of this lexical cluster is polysemy: the same words can denote both crimes and types of punishment. There are also pairs of short words for crimes and criminals, synonymic doublets of different roots expressing the same concept, and word-formation variants. The analysis confirms that in the 16th century terminology in this field had not yet been standardised, and the three editions of the Statute reflect particular stages in the formation of legal-juridical terminology. Thus, besides its legal value, the Statute is a unique linguistic phenomenon of its time.