Law School

Rehabilitation is the process of re-educating and retraining those who have committed a crime. It generally involves psychological approaches which target the cognitive distortions associated with specific kinds of crime committed by particular offenders – but may also involve more general education such as literacy skills and work training. The goal is to reintegrate offenders back into society....

Cruelty to animals, also called animal abuse, animal neglect or animal cruelty, is the infliction by omission (neglect) or by commission by humans of suffering or harm upon non-human animals. More narrowly, it can be the causing of harm or suffering for specific achievements, such as killing animals for entertainment; cruelty to animals sometimes encompasses inflicting harm or suffering as an end...

Joint wills and mutual wills are closely related terms used in the law of wills to describe two types of testamentary writing that may be executed by a married couple to ensure that their property is disposed of identically. Neither should be confused with mirror wills which means two separate, identical wills, which may or may not also be mutual wills. Joint wills. A joint will is a single docume...

Trover cases in the United States. Trover is the name of the action which lay, at common law, for the recovery of damages for the conversion of personal property in his possession, usually involving chattels held in bailment. Although the old forms of action have been abolished or disappeared under modern civil procedure in the United States, the common law action for conversion still exists in fa...

In copyright law, related rights (or neighboring rights) are the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author. It is used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". Neighboring rights is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Both authors' rights and related rights are copyrights in the sense of English or U.S. law. Related rights vary much mor...

Recidivism from recidive and -ism, from Latin recidivus "recurring", from re- "back" and cado "I fall") is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have experienced negative consequences of that behavior. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense. The term is frequently used in conjunction with criminal behavior...

Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants (mostly civilians and neutral military personnel). The terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" originated during the French Revolution of the late...

Legislation. Such were the principal stages in the history of the law as it affected wills made before 1838 or proved before 1858. The principal Acts in force in the early twentieth century were the Wills Act 1837, the amending Act of 1852, the Court of Probate Act 1857, the Judicature Acts 1873 and 1875, and the Land Transfer Act 1897. All but the Acts of 1837 and 1852 deal mainly with what happe...

Trover is a form of lawsuit in common-law countries for recovery of damages for wrongful taking of personal property. Trover belongs to a series of remedies for such wrongful taking, its distinctive feature being recovery only for the value of whatever was taken, not for the recovery of the property itself. Overview Although actions in trover can be traced to the time of Bracton, and later Edward...

Plant genetic resources describe the variability within plants that comes from human and natural selection over millennia. Their intrinsic value mainly concerns agricultural crops (crop biodiversity). According to the 1983 revised International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), plant genetic resources are defined as the...

A pardon is a government decision to allow a person to be relieved of some or all of the legal consequences resulting from a criminal conviction. A pardon may be granted before or after conviction for the crime, depending on the laws of the jurisdiction. Pardons can be granted in many countries when individuals are deemed to have demonstrated that they have "paid their debt to society", or are oth...

A duel is an arranged engagement in combat between two people, with matched weapons, in accordance with agreed-upon rules. During the 17th and 18th centuries (and earlier), duels were mostly single combat fought with swords (the rapier and later the small sword), but beginning in the late 18th century in England, duels were more commonly fought using pistols. Fencing and shooting continued to co-e...

Legal history of wills Wills have a lengthy history. Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greek practice concerning wills was not the same in all places; some states permitted men to dispose of their estates, others wholly deprived them of that privilege. According to Plutarch, Solon "is much commended for his law concerning wills; for before his time no man was allowed to make any, but all the wealth of d...

Replevin or claim and delivery (sometimes called revendication) is a legal remedy, which enables a person to recover personal property taken wrongfully or unlawfully, and to obtain compensation for resulting losses. Nature. From medieval times, there has also come down to us a summary process, known as replevin, by which a man out of whose possession goods have been taken may obtain their return u...

Governing laws. The grant and enforcement of patents are governed by national laws, and also by international treaties, where those treaties have been given effect in national laws. Patents are granted by national or regional patent offices, for example national or regional administrative authorities. A given patent is therefore only useful for protecting an invention in the country in which that...

Compensation for wrongful conviction. Article 14(6) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states that when a miscarriage of justice has occurred and the defendant's conviction has been reversed or they have been pardoned, "the person who has suffered punishment as a result of such conviction shall be compensated according to law". The right to compensation is also aut...

Repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, 1948–1967. In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled in Perez v Sharp (1948) that the California anti-miscegenation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the first time since Reconstruction that a state court declared such laws unconstitutional, and making California the first state since Ohio in 1887 to overturn its anti-mis...

A will or testament is a legal document that expresses a person's (testator) wishes as to how their property (estate) is to be distributed after their death and as to which person (executor) is to manage the property until its final distribution. For the distribution (devolution) of property not determined by a will, see inheritance and intestacy. Though it has been thought a "will" historically a...

Tracing is a legal process, not a remedy, by which a claimant demonstrates what has happened to his or her property, identifies its proceeds and those persons who have handled or received them, and asks the court to award a proprietary remedy in respect of the property, or an asset substituted for the original property or its proceeds. Tracing allows transmission of legal claims from the original...

A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. In most countries, patent rights fall under private law and the patent holder must sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce their rights. In some i...

A miscarriage of justice occurs when a grossly unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes...

Anti-miscegenation laws. In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were passed by most states to prohibit interracial marriage, and in some cases also prohibit interracial sexual relations. Some such laws predate the establishment of the United States, some dating to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted s...

Voluntary dismissal is termination of a lawsuit by voluntary request of the plaintiff (the party who originally filed the lawsuit). A voluntary dismissal with prejudice (meaning the plaintiff is permanently barred from further litigating the same subject matter) is the modern descendant of the common law procedure known as retraxit. In the United States, voluntary dismissal in Federal court is sub...

Incidental damages. Incidental damages refers to the type of legal damages that are reasonably associated with, or related to, actual damages. In American commercial law, incidental damages are a seller's commercially reasonable expenses incurred in stopping delivery or in transporting and caring for goods after a buyer's breach of contract, (UCC Sec. 2-710) or a buyer's expenses reasonably incurr...

International rights. In 1957, in France negotiations took place concerned with the protection of new varieties. This led to the creation of the Union Internationale pour la Protection des Obtentions Végétales (UPOV) and adoption of the first text of the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV Convention) in 1961. The purpose of the Convention was to ensure tha...