Gifis - Dictionary of Legal Terms

DICTIONARY OF

LEGAL
TERMS

Definitions and explanations for non-lawyers!

Fifth Edition

BARRONS

DICTIONARY OF

LEGAL
TERMS

Fifth Edition

STEVEN H. GIFIS

Former Associate Professor of Law
Rutgers University School of Law/Newark

Copyright 2016, 2008, 1998, 1993, 1983 by Barrons Educational Series, Inc.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright owner.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015009342

EISBN: 978-1-4380-6796-4

Gifis, Steven H. author.
Dictionary of legal terms : definitions and explanations for non-lawyers /
Steven H. Gifis. Fifth edition.
pages cm

Summary: This book provides basic definitions of thousands of the most common legal terms. It is meant for both laymen and legal specialists Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4380-0512-6 (paperback)

1. LawUnited StatesDictionaries. I. Title.

KF156.G53 2015

349.7303dc23

CONTENTS

Professions tend to insulate themselves from lay understanding by the development of specialized jargon. The legal profession has achieved this insulation so successfully that the uninitiated is overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of his or her lawyers prose. Despite the increasing pervasiveness of law into every facet of modern life, the special language of the law remains a barrier to nonlawyers. In recent years plain language statutes have been passed by several states, requiring that consumer contracts, such as residential leases, be written in plain, everyday language. Yet, even with these reforms, the language of the lawyer often remains a mystery to the client.

The lawyers language is replete with words having particular meanings. Thus, a lawyer moves to evict a holdover tenant when his or her client wants to kick the tenant out. The lawyer seeks to partition a co-tenancy gone sour and to compel an accounting to the aggrieved party. A clients home is destroyed by earthquake and the insurance company refuses to pay. An attorney asks if the risk of earthquake is included in the insureds policy and, if not, whether representations were made to the homeowner that would support an action to reform the policy or that might create an estoppel against the companys denial of liability. A merchant finds an umbrella in a coat rack; the attorney asks whether it has been abandoned or mislaid and explains to the merchant the duty that the law imposes upon a finder of lost property.

In 1975 I authored a paperback law dictionary primarily for law students who were trying to comprehend what I and their other law professors were saying. That book has been used by hundreds of thousands of law students. It is hoped they have found it of assistance in understanding the baffling new world of law. Paralegals, legal secretaries and other professionals who regularly interact with lawyers have also purchased the law dictionary. It occurred to me, however, that the greatest need for communication existed between the lawyer and the client. And, even for the general citizens, it seemed to me that comprehending the ordinary newspaper article had to be growing more and more difficult as the news of the day became more and more entangled with legal jargon. The available law dictionaries were either too sophisticated for the average lay person or too simplistic and incomplete to be helpful. The purpose of this book is to provide a ready, accessible and useful source of understanding of the language of law and law-related processes and concepts.

The text of the book has been drawn in large part from my companion publication Law Dictionary . The definitions have been re-drafted in lay terms and the citations to authority have been deleted. Users of this book who need a more detailed explanation of a term may find resort to the Law Dictionary appropriate. And, in addition to the greater readability of the text, many new terms were added that law students might not encounter in their studies and that might not be thought of as technically legal terms but that have special meaning and arise in legal contexts. Hundreds of definitions have been added from the fields of securities, finance and taxation, which will assist the average person in understanding the business section of a newspaper. Abbreviations such as N.O.V. have been defined so that the user will not have to fumble through many other sources until he or she discovers that the phrase refers to non obstante verdicto.

Although the book is titled a Dictionary of Legal Terms and may be used as one would use any other dictionary, it is contemplated that the user may want to skim through the book from time to time, stopping to read definitions touching upon jargon that he or she has noticed but not comprehended. In this fashion the book will be a primer for the lay person and hopefully will bridge the communication gap between the reader and the law.

STEVEN H. GIFIS

Lawrenceville, New Jersey

A number of persons contributed to the first edition of this book. The financial and securities terms were drafted by Michael B. Perkins, C.F.A.; the taxation terms, by David Mills, Esq. The task of editing the Law Dictionary into a laymans version was handled very ably by Keith Roberts, Esq., and significant editorial assistance was rendered by Alan Dexter Bowman, Esq., and Joseph C. Mahon, Esq. The examples were drafted by Andrew Levine, Rutgers School of Law-Newark, Class of 1984. The overall editing of the entire manuscript was performed with great skill and precision by my wife, Susan Pollard Gifis, Esq. Finally, the entire manuscript was typed and retyped with great care and cheerfulness by my secretary, Angela Di Pierro.

I was most fortunate to persuade my wife once again to lend her considerable talents to the editing of the second edition. The cross-references were improved, new terms were added, the text was made more gender-neutral, and the examples and definitions sharpened and made more readable. This fifth edition incorporates much of the improvements in the sixth edition of the companion volume, Law Dictionary. The manuscript for this edition was reviewed by Amira Rahman Scurato and her husband Michael and daughter Katie. Without their efforts, this new edition would not have been possible. I am deeply indebted to them for their excellent input.

The decision as to which Latin words, maxims and expressions should be included in this dictionary, in view of the thousands that the user might encounter, was necessarily a somewhat arbitrary one; but an earnest effort has been made to translate and, where appropriate, to illuminate those terms and phrases considered likely to be crucial to a full understanding of important legal concepts. Hopefully, there are no significant omissions and we have erred only on the side of overinclusiveness.

Each of the Latin and French words and phrasesat least those that continue to be recognized as such and have not become, functionally, a part of the English languageincludes a phonetic spelling designed to assist the user in the pronunciation of terms that are probably unfamiliar to her or him. The purpose in providing this pronunciation guide, however, has not been to indicate the correct mode of pronouncing the terms; rather, the goal has been to afford the user a guide to an acceptable pronunciation of them. In the case of Latin words, therefore, neither the classic nor the ecclesiastical pronunciation has been strictly followed; instead, the phonetic spellings provided herein reflect the often considerable extent to which pronunciation has been Anglicized and/or Americanized, partly through widespread legal usage.