From Dracon we get the word 'Draconian', meaning an old and unnecessarily heavy punishment. Dracon was infamous for the severe sentences his laws imposed on such minor crimes as idleness, petty theft, and vagrancy. Rather than think of lesser sentences for minor crimes, legend has it that Dracon was always trying to think of sentences worse than death for the really major ones.

He did, however, introduce the first legal distinction between deliberate and accidental homicide.