Functus Officio
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Functus Officio
refers to an officer or agency whose mandate has expired, due to either the arrival of an expiry date or an agency having accomplished the purpose for which it was created. When used to describe a court, it can refer to one whose duty or authority has come to an end: "Once a court has passed a valid sentence after a lawful hearing, it becomes and cannot reopen the case." Relationship to doctrine of ' is thus bound up with the doctrine of , which prevents (in the absence of statutory authority) the re-opening of a matter before the same court, tribunal or other statutory actor that rendered the final decision. There are many exceptions; for instance, where a statute authorizes variations of the original decision, the decision maker may revisit his or her previous decision. Common examples include legal competency hearings, parole board hearings and family law proceedings. There is an important difference between and ': the former refers to the end of a case, while the latt ...
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Res Judicata
''Res judicata'' (RJ) or ''res iudicata'', also known as claim preclusion, is the Latin term for "a matter decided" and refers to either of two concepts in both civil law and common law legal systems: a case in which there has been a final judgment and that is no longer subject to appeal; and the legal doctrine meant to bar (or preclude) relitigation of a claim between the same parties. In the case of ''res judicata'', the matter cannot be raised again, either in the same court or in a different court. A court will use ''res judicata'' to deny reconsideration of a matter. The doctrine of ''res judicata'' is a method of preventing injustice to the parties of a case supposedly finished but perhaps also or mostly a way of avoiding unnecessary waste of judicial resources. ''Res judicata'' does not merely prevent future judgments from contradicting earlier ones, but also prevents litigants from multiplying judgments, and confusion. Common law In common law jurisdictions, the prin ...
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Competence (law)
In United States and Canadian law, competence concerns the mental capacity of an individual to participate in legal proceedings or transactions, and the mental condition a person must have to be responsible for his or her decisions or acts. Competence is an attribute that is decision-specific. Depending on various factors which typically revolve around mental function integrity, an individual may or may not be competent to make a particular medical decision, a particular contractual agreement, to execute an effective deed to real property, or to execute a will having certain terms. Depending on the state, a guardian or conservator may be appointed by a court for a person who satisfies the state's tests for general incompetence, and the guardian or conservator exercises the incompetent's rights for the incompetent. Defendants who do not possess sufficient "competence" are usually excluded from criminal prosecution, while witnesses found not to possess requisite competence cannot ...
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Parole Board
A parole board is a panel of people who decide whether an offender should be released from prison on parole after serving at least a minimum portion of their sentence as prescribed by the sentencing judge. Parole boards are used in many jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand. A related concept is the board of pardons and paroles, which may deal with pardons and commutations as well as paroles. A parole board consists of people qualified to make judgements about the suitability of a prisoner for return to free society. Members may be judges, psychiatrists, or criminologists, although some jurisdictions do not have written qualifications for parole board members and allow community members to serve as them. A universal requirement is that board candidates be of good moral fiber. Canada New Zealand United Kingdom In the United Kingdom parole board members are also drawn from a wider circle of professions. The boards typically make a jud ...
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Family Law
Family law (also called matrimonial law or the law of domestic relations) is an area of the law that deals with family matters and domestic relations. Overview Subjects that commonly fall under a nation's body of family law include: * Marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnerships: ** Entry into legally recognized spousal and domestic relationships ** The termination of legally recognized family relationships and ancillary matters, including divorce, annulment, property settlements, alimony, child custody and visitation, child support and alimony awards **Prenuptial and Postnuptial agreements * Adoption: proceedings to adopt a child and, in some cases, an adult. * Surrogacy: the law and process of giving birth as a surrogate mother * Child protective proceedings: court proceedings that may result from state intervention in cases of child abuse and child neglect * Juvenile law: Matters relating to minors including status offenses, delinquency, emancipation and juvenile ...
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Court Of Appeal (England And Wales)
The Court of Appeal (formally "His Majesty's Court of Appeal in England", commonly cited as "CA", "EWCA" or "CoA") is the highest court within the Senior Courts of England and Wales, and second in the legal system of England and Wales only to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. The Court of Appeal was created in 1875, and today comprises 39 Lord Justices of Appeal and Lady Justices of Appeal. The court has two divisions, Criminal and Civil, led by the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England respectively. Criminal appeals are heard in the Criminal Division, and civil appeals in the Civil Division. The Criminal Division hears appeals from the Crown Court, while the Civil Division hears appeals from the County Court, High Court of Justice and Family Court. Permission to appeal is normally required from either the lower court or the Court of Appeal itself; and with permission, further appeal may lie to the Supreme Court. The C ...
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Court Of Chancery
The Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid a slow pace of change and possible harshness (or "inequity") of the Common law#History, common law. The Chancery had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including English trusts law, trusts, English property law, land law, the estates of Mental illness, lunatics and the guardianship of infants. Its initial role was somewhat different: as an extension of the lord chancellor's role as Keeper of the King's Conscience, the court was an administrative body primarily concerned with conscientious law. Thus the Court of Chancery had a far greater remit than the common law courts, whose decisions it had the jurisdiction to overrule for much of its existence, and was far more flexible. Until the 19th century, the Court of Chancery could apply a far wider range of remedies than common law courts, such as specific performance and injunctions, and had some power to grant damage ...
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Judicature Acts
In the history of the courts of England and Wales, the Judicature Acts were a series of Acts of Parliament, beginning in the 1870s, which aimed to fuse the hitherto split system of courts of England and Wales. The first two Acts were the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873 (36 & 37 Vict. c. 66) and the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1875 (38 & 39 Vict. c. 77), with a further series of amending acts (12 in all by 1899). By the Act of 1873 (ss. 3, 4), the Court of Chancery, the Court of King's Bench (known as the Queen's Bench when there is a female Sovereign), the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Exchequer, the High Court of Admiralty, the Court of Probate, and the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes were consolidated into the Supreme Court of Judicature, subdivided into two courts: the "High Court of Justice" ("High Court"), with (broadly speaking) original jurisdiction, and the "Court of Appeal". Besides this restructuring, the objects of the act were threefold: *t ...
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Minister Of Manpower And Immigration
The minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship (french: Ministre de l'immigration, des réfugiés et de la citoyenneté) is a minister of the Crown in the Cabinet of Canada, Canadian Cabinet. The minister is Responsible government, responsible for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which is the federal department responsible for Immigration to Canada, immigration, Refugees in Canada, refugee and Citizenship in Canada, citizenship issues in Canada. The current minister is Sean Fraser (politician), Sean Fraser. Prior to the current position, the portfolios responsible for immigration in Canada throughout history were titled: Immigration and Colonization (1917–36), Minister of Mines and Resources, Mines and Resources (1936–50), Citizenship and Immigration (1950–66), Manpower and Immigration (1966–77), and of Employment and Immigration (1977–96). The office as it exists today was created in 1994 by the ''Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act''. ...
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Arbitration
Arbitration is a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) that resolves disputes outside the judiciary courts. The dispute will be decided by one or more persons (the 'arbitrators', 'arbiters' or 'arbitral tribunal'), which renders the 'arbitration award'. An arbitration decision or award is legally binding on both sides and enforceable in the courts, unless all parties stipulate that the arbitration process and decision are non-binding. Arbitration is often used for the resolution of commercial disputes, particularly in the context of international commercial transactions. In certain countries such as the United States, arbitration is also frequently employed in consumer and employment matters, where arbitration may be mandated by the terms of employment or commercial contracts and may include a waiver of the right to bring a class action claim. Mandatory consumer and employment arbitration should be distinguished from consensual arbitration, particularly commercial ...
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Latin Legal Terminology
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ...
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