Legal Fictions
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Legal Fictions
A legal fiction is a construct used in the law where a thing is taken to be true, which is not in fact true, in order to achieve an outcome. Legal fictions can be employed by the courts or found in legislation. Legal fictions are different from legal presumptions which assume a certain state of facts until the opposite is proved, such as the presumption of legitimacy. The term ''legal fiction'' is sometimes used in a pejorative way. Jeremy Bentham was a famous historical critic of legal fictions. Proponents of legal fictions, particularly of their use historically, identify legal fictions as " scaffolding around a building under construction". Common law examples Adoption Child adoption is a legal fiction in that the adoptive parents become the legal parents, notwithstanding the lack of a biological relationship. Once an order or judgment of adoption is entered, the biological parents become legal strangers to the child, legally no longer related nor with any rights related t ...
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Presumption
In law, a presumption is an "inference of a particular fact". There are two types of presumptions: rebuttable presumptions and irrebuttable (or conclusive) presumptions. A rebuttable presumption will either shift the burden of production (requiring the disadvantaged party to produce some Evidence (law), evidence to the contrary) or the burden of proof (law), burden of proof (requiring the disadvantaged party to show the presumption is wrong); in short, a Trier of fact, fact finder can reject a rebuttable presumption based on other evidence. Conversely, a conclusive/irrebuttable presumption cannot be challenged by contradictory facts or evidence. Sometimes, a presumption must be triggered by a predicate fact—that is, the fact must be found before the presumption applies. History The ancient Jewish law code, the Talmud, included reasoning from presumptions (''hazakah''), propositions taken to be true unless there was reason to believe otherwise, such as "One does not ordinarily ...
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Ejectment
Ejectment is a common law term for civil action to recover the possession of or title to land. It replaced the old real actions and the various possessory assizes (denoting county-based pleas to local sittings of the courts) where boundary disputes often featured. Though still used in some places, the term is now obsolete in many common law jurisdictions, in which possession and title are sued by the actions of eviction Eviction is the removal of a Tenement (law), tenant from leasehold estate, rental property by the landlord. In some jurisdictions it may also involve the removal of persons from premises that were foreclosure, foreclosed by a mortgagee (often ... (also called possession proceedings) and quiet title (or injunctive and/or declaratory relief), respectively. Originally, successful ejectment meant recovery of possession of land, for example against a defaulting tenant or a trespasser, who did not have (or once had but no longer does) any right to remain ther ...
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Court Of King's Bench (England)
The Court of King's Bench, formally known as The Court of the King Before the King Himself, was a court of common law in the English legal system. Created in the late 12th to early 13th century from the '' curia regis'', the King's Bench initially followed the monarch on his travels. The King's Bench finally joined the Court of Common Pleas and Exchequer of Pleas in Westminster Hall in 1318, making its last travels in 1421. The King's Bench was merged into the High Court of Justice by the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873, after which point the King's Bench was a division within the High Court. The King's Bench was staffed by one Chief Justice (now the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales) and usually three Puisne Justices. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the King's Bench's jurisdiction and caseload was significantly challenged by the rise of the Court of Chancery and equitable doctrines as one of the two principal common law courts along with the Common Pleas. To r ...
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Debt
Debt is an obligation that requires one party, the debtor, to pay money Loan, borrowed or otherwise withheld from another party, the creditor. Debt may be owed by a sovereign state or country, local government, company, or an individual. Commercial debt is generally subject to contractual terms regarding the amount and timing of repayments of #Principal, principal and interest. Loans, bond (finance), bonds, notes, and Mortgage loan, mortgages are all types of debt. In financial accounting, debt is a type of financial transaction, as distinct from equity (finance), equity. The term can also be used metaphorically to cover morality, moral obligations and other interactions not based on a monetary value. For example, in Western cultures, a person who has been helped by a second person is sometimes said to owe a "debt of gratitude" to the second person. Etymology The English term "debt" was first used in the late 13th century and comes by way of Old French from the Latin verb ' ...
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Exchequer Of Pleas
The Exchequer of Pleas, or Court of Exchequer, was a court that dealt with matters of equity (law), equity, a set of legal principles based on natural law and Common law#History, common law in England and Wales. Originally part of the , or King's Council, the Exchequer of Pleas split from the in the 1190s to sit as an independent central court. The Court of Chancery's reputation for tardiness and expense resulted in much of its business transferring to the Exchequer. The Exchequer and Chancery, with similar jurisdictions, drew closer together over the years until an argument was made during the 19th century that having two seemingly identical courts was unnecessary. As a result, the Exchequer lost its equity jurisdiction. With the Judicature Acts, the Exchequer was formally dissolved as a judicial body by an Order in Council on 16 December 1880. The Exchequer's jurisdiction at various times was common law, equity or both. Initially a court of both common law and equity, it lost ...
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DPP V Camplin
''DPP v Camplin'' (1978) was an England and Wales, English criminal law appeal to the House of Lords Judicial Committee, House of Lords in 1978. Its unanimous judgment helped to define the main limits of defence of Provocation in English law, provocation chiefly until Parliament replaced the defence with one of "loss of control" in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Its ratio decidendi (main reasoning) continues to have precedent value as the new "loss of control" defence is a renaming to avoid creep of the term into scenarios for which it was never intended, above all a blurring with diminished responsibility. Facts of the case The defendant at trial, Camplin, was 15 years old at the time of the offence. He killed Mohammed Lal Khan by hitting him on the head with a chapati pan following Khan raping him (then referred to as buggery) and then laughing at him. Decision The jury weighed up the evidence and convicted Camplin of murder. He appealed contending the judge was w ...
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Judicial Functions Of The House Of Lords
Whilst the House of Lords of the United Kingdom is the upper chamber of Parliament and has government ministers, for many centuries it had a judicial function. It functioned as a court of first instance for the trials of peers and for Impeachment in the United Kingdom, impeachments, and as a court of last resort in the United Kingdom and prior, the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of England. Appeals were technically not to the House of Lords, but rather to the King-in-Parliament. In Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, 1876, the Appellate Jurisdiction Act devolved the appellate functions of the House to an Appellate Committee, composed of Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, Lords of Appeal in Ordinary (informally referred to as Law Lords). They were then appointed by the Lord Chancellor in the same manner as other judges. During the 20th and early 21st century, the judicial functions were gradually removed. Its final trial of a peer was in 1935, and the use of special courts for ...
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Objective Test
Objective tests are measures in which responses maximize objectivity, in the sense that response options are structured such that examinees have only a limited set of options (e.g. Likert scale A Likert scale ( ,) is a psychometric scale named after its inventor, American social psychologist Rensis Likert, which is commonly used in research questionnaires. It is the most widely used approach to scaling responses in survey research, s ..., true or false). Structuring a measure in this way is intended to minimize subjectivity or bias on the part of the individual administering the measure so that administering and interpreting the results does not rely on the judgment of the examiner. Although the term ‘objective test’ encompasses a wide range of tests with which most people are somewhat familiar (i.e. Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Graduate Record Examination, and the Standardized Achievement Test), it is a term that aro ...
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Man On The Clapham Omnibus
The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would – for example, in a tort, civil action for negligence. The character is a reasonably educated, intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured. The term was introduced into English law during the Victorian era, and is still an important concept in British law. It is also used in other Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth common law jurisdictions, sometimes with suitable modifications to the phrase as an aid to local comprehension. The route of the original "Clapham Horsebus, omnibus" is unknown but London Buses route 88, which terminates at Omnibus Theatre, was briefly branded as "the Clapham Omnibus" in the 1990s and is sometimes associated with the term. History The phrase was reportedly first put to legal use in a judgment by Sir Rich ...
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Reasonable Person
In law, a reasonable person or reasonable man is a hypothetical person whose character and care conduct, under any ''common set of facts,'' is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy. It is a legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. In some practices, for circumstances arising from an ''uncommon set of facts,'' this person represents a composite of a relevant community's judgement as to how a typical member of that community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm (through action or inaction) to the public. The reasonable person is used as a tool to standardize, teach law students, or explain the law to a jury. The reasonable person belongs to a family of hypothetical figures in law including: the "right-thinking member of society", the "officious bystander", the "reasonable parent", the "reasonable landlord", the "fair-minded and informed observer", the "person having ordinary skill in the ar ...
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Negligence
Negligence ( Lat. ''negligentia'') is a failure to exercise appropriate care expected to be exercised in similar circumstances. Within the scope of tort law, negligence pertains to harm caused by the violation of a duty of care through a negligent act or failure to act. The concept of negligence is linked to the obligation of individuals to exercise reasonable care in their actions and to consider foreseeable harm that their conduct might cause to other people or property. The elements of a negligence claim include the duty to act or refrain from action, breach of that duty, actual and proximate cause of harm, and damages. Someone who suffers loss caused by another's negligence may be able to sue for damages to compensate for their harm. Such loss may include physical injury, harm to property, psychiatric illness, or economic loss. Elements of negligence claims To successfully pursue a claim of negligence through a lawsuit, a plaintiff must establish the " elements" of neg ...
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England
England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It shares Anglo-Scottish border, a land border with Scotland to the north and England–Wales border, another land border with Wales to the west, and is otherwise surrounded by the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south, the Celtic Sea to the south-west, and the Irish Sea to the west. Continental Europe lies to the south-east, and Ireland to the west. At the 2021 United Kingdom census, 2021 census, the population was 56,490,048. London is both List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, the largest city and the Capital city, capital. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Paleolithic. It takes its name from the Angles (tribe), Angles, a Germanic peoples, Germanic tribe who settled du ...
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