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A question of law on which no court has previously ruled, or a factual situation about which no court has previously ruled; a legal case without a precedent: res nullius: nobody's thing Ownerless property or goods. Such property or goods are able and subject to being owned by anybody. res publica: public affair
The plain meaning rule attempts to guide courts faced with litigation that turns on the meaning of a term not defined by the statute, or on that of a word found within a definition itself. According to the plain meaning rule, absent a contrary definition within the statute, words must be given their plain, ordinary and literal meaning.
Law professors traditionally have played a much smaller role in developing case law in common law than professors in civil law. Because court decisions in civil law traditions are historically brief [4] and not formally amenable to establishing precedent, much of the exposition of the law in civil law traditions is done by academics rather than ...
Precedent is a judicial decision that serves as an authority for courts when deciding subsequent identical or similar cases. [1] [2] [3] Fundamental to common law legal systems, precedent operates under the principle of stare decisis ("to stand by things decided"), where past judicial decisions serve as case law to guide future rulings, thus promoting consistency and predictability.
An unpublished opinion is a decision of a court that is not available for citation as precedent because the court deems the case to have insufficient precedential value. In the system of common law, each judicial decision becomes part of the body of law used in future decisions. However, some courts reserve certain decisions, leaving them ...
The Court a quo is the court from which a cause has been removed to a higher court, which latter is called the Court ad quem. [2] A vinculo matrimonii. (Lat. from the bond of matrimony) A term descriptive of a kind of divorce, which effects a complete dissolution of the marriage contract. [1] Abactor. l. A cattle-stealer. [3] Abandonment ...
A dissenting opinion does not create binding precedent nor does it become a part of case law, though they can sometimes be cited as a form of persuasive authority in subsequent cases when arguing that the court's holding should be limited or overturned. In some cases, a previous dissent is used to spur a change in the law, and a later case may ...
In English law, a dictum is any statement made as part of a judgment of a court. Thus the term includes dicta stated incidentally, in passing (obiter dicta), that are not a necessary part of the rationale for the court's decision (referred to as the ratio decidendi).