Law School

Income tax. Taxes based on income are imposed at the federal, most state, and some local levels within the United States. The tax systems within each jurisdiction may define taxable income separately. Many states refer to some extent to federal concepts for determining taxable income. History of the income tax. The first Income tax in the United States was implemented with the Revenue Act of 1861...

An equitable servitude is a term used in the law of real property to describe a nonpossessory interest in land that operates much like a covenant running with the land. In England and Wales the term is defunct and in Scotland it has very long been a sub-type of the Scottish legal version of servitudes, which are what English law calls easements. However covenants and equitable servitudes in most o...

Fornication is generally consensual sexual intercourse between two people not married to each other. When one or more of the partners having consensual sexual intercourse is married to another person, it is called adultery. Nonetheless, John Calvin viewed adultery to be any sexual act that is outside the divine model for sexual intercourse, which includes fornication. For many people, the term car...

Conflict of laws in the United States is the field of procedural law dealing with choice of law rules when a legal action implicates the substantive laws of more than one jurisdiction and a court must determine which law is most appropriate to resolve the action. In the United States, the rules governing these matters have diverged from the traditional rules applied internationally. The outcome of...

Restitutio ad integrum, or restitutio in integrum, is a Latin term that means "restoration to original condition". It is one of the primary guiding principles behind the awarding of damages in common law negligence claims. In European patent law, it also refers to a means of redress available to an applicant or patentee who has failed to meet a time limit despite exercising all due care. In ancien...

The United States of America has separate federal, state, and local governments with taxes imposed at each of these levels. Taxes are levied on income, payroll, property, sales, capital gains, dividends, imports, estates and gifts, as well as various fees. In 2010, taxes collected by federal, state, and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP. In the OECD, only Chile and Mexico are taxed le...

Easement by prescription: Easements by prescription, also called prescriptive easements, are implied easements granted after the dominant estate has used the property in a hostile, continuous and open manner for a statutorily prescribed number of years. Prescriptive easements differ from adverse possession by not requiring exclusivity. Once they become legally binding, easements by prescription ho...

Adultery (from Latin adulterium) is extramarital sex that is considered objectionable on social, religious, moral, or legal grounds. Although the sexual activities that constitute adultery vary, as well as the social, religious, and legal consequences, the concept exists in many cultures and is similar in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Adultery is viewed by many jurisdictions as offensive to pub...

Choice of law is a procedural stage in the litigation of a case involving the conflict of laws when it is necessary to reconcile the differences between the laws of different legal jurisdictions, such as sovereign states, federated states (as in the US), or provinces. The outcome of this process is potentially to require the courts of one jurisdiction to apply the law of a different jurisdiction i...

Res ipsa loquitur (Latin: "the thing speaks for itself") is a doctrine in the Anglo-American common law and Roman-Dutch law that says in a tort or civil lawsuit a court can infer negligence from the very nature of an accident or injury in the absence of direct evidence on how any defendant behaved. Although modern formulations differ by jurisdiction, Anglo-American common law originally stated tha...

Undermining Reconstruction state governments. After the American Civil War, the United States government established Reconstruction era governments in the states of the former Confederacy that included black and carpetbagger representatives. The loss of political power by the formerly dominant white supremacists led to resentment, protest, and the formation of paramilitaries and parallel governmen...

An easement is a nonpossessory right to use and/or enter onto the real property of another without possessing it. It is "best typified in the right of way which one landowner, A, may enjoy over the land of another, B". An easement is a property right and type of incorporeal property in itself at common law in most jurisdictions. An easement is similar to real covenants and equitable servitudes. In...

Sex and the law deals with the regulation by law of human sexual activity. Sex laws vary from one place or jurisdiction to another, and have varied over time, and unlawful sexual acts are also called sex crimes. Some laws regarding sexual activity are intended to protect one or all participants, while others are intended to proscribe behavior that has been defined as a crime. For example, a law ma...

In conflict of laws, renvoi (from the French, meaning "send back" or "to return unopened") is a subset of the choice of law rules and it may be applied whenever a forum court is directed to consider the law of another state. The procedure for conflict cases. 1. The court must first decide whether it has the jurisdiction to hear the case (which will involve addressing the question of whether the pl...

In law and insurance, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to an injury that the courts deem the event to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. (For example, but for running the red light, the col...

Tax resistance in the United States has been practiced at least since colonial times, and has played important parts in American history. Tax resistance is the refusal to pay a tax, usually by means that bypass established legal norms, as a means of protest, nonviolent resistance, or conscientious objection. It was a core tactic of the American Revolution and has played a role in many struggles in...

Nomenclature. Throughout the world, there are a large number of different types and sub-divisions of liens. Not all of the following liens exist in all legal systems that recognise the concept of a lien. The following are descriptions that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Types of lien include accountant's lien—the right of an accountant to retain a client's papers until the accountant's fe...

Types of stalkers. Psychologists often group individuals who stalk into two categories: psychotic and nonpsychotic. Some stalkers may have pre-existing psychotic disorders such as delusional disorder, schizoaffective disorder, or schizophrenia. However, most stalkers are nonpsychotic and may exhibit disorders or neuroses such as major depression, adjustment disorder, or substance dependence, as we...

Characterization, in conflict of laws, is the second stage of the procedure to resolve a lawsuit that involves foreign law. The process is described in English law as Characterisation, or classification within the English judgments of the European Court of Justice. It is alternatively known as qualification in French law. It is used to determine the correct choice of law rules based on the circums...

Personal circumstances. The legal fiction of the reasonable person is an ideal, as nobody is perfect. Everyone has limitations, so the standard requires only that people act similarly to how "a reasonable person under the circumstances" would, as if their limitations were themselves circumstances. As such, courts require that the reasonable person be viewed as having the same limitations as the de...

Whistleblower program. In addition to the methods of proof the IRS has developed, the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 created the IRS Whistleblower Office, which allows anonymous whistle blowers to receive 15 to 30 percent of any recovery by the IRS which comes to at least $2 million including all penalties, interests and any other monies collected from the government. The whistleblower pro...

A nonpossessory interest in land is a term of the law of property to describe any of a category of rights held by one person to use land that is in the possession of another. Such rights can generally be created in one of two ways: either by an express agreement between the party who owns the land and the party who seeks to own the interest; or by an order of a court. Under the common law, there a...

Stalking is unwanted and/or repeated surveillance by an individual or group toward another person. Stalking behaviors are interrelated to harassment and intimidation and may include following the victim in person or monitoring them. The term stalking is used with some differing definitions in psychiatry and psychology, as well as in some legal jurisdictions as a term for a criminal offense. Accord...

Conflict of laws (also called private international law) is the set of rules or laws a jurisdiction applies to a case, transaction, or other occurrence that has connections to more than one jurisdiction. This body of law deals with three broad topics: jurisdiction, rules regarding when it is appropriate for a court to hear such a case; foreign judgments, dealing with the rules by which a court in...

In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. Strictly according to the fiction, it is misconceived for a party to seek evidence from actual people in order to establish how the reasonable man would have acted or what he would have foreseen. Thi...