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Rule Of Lenity
The rule of lenity, also called the rule of strict construction, is a principle of criminal statutory interpretation that requires that when a law is unclear or ambiguous, a court must apply the law in the manner that is most favorable to the defendant. The rule has a long history in the law and has been an important element of the relationship between the courts and the legislature, but its role in modern jurisprudence is less clear. Overview Today, determining legislative intent is a critical job that arises from the distinct and separate roles played by the judiciary and the legislature in administering justice. Judges are routinely required to apply the relevant laws and rules passed by the legislature to the decisions they make. There are reasons this can be difficult. For one, laws are intended to apply generally and it would be impossible for the legislature to foresee all the possible situations to which they might apply after their enactment. The rule of lenity is on ...
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Criminal Law
Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It prescribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and moral welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal law is established by statute, which is to say that the laws are enacted by a legislature. Criminal law includes the punishment and rehabilitation of people who violate such laws. Criminal law varies according to jurisdiction, and differs from civil law, where emphasis is more on dispute resolution and victim compensation, rather than on punishment or rehabilitation. Criminal procedure is a formalized official activity that authenticates the fact of commission of a crime and authorizes punitive or rehabilitative treatment of the offender. History The first civilizations generally did not distinguish between civil law and criminal law. The first written codes of law were designed by the Sumerians. Around 2100–2050 BC Ur-Nammu, the N ...
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Clear Statement Rule
In American law, the clear statement rule is a guideline for statutory construction, instructing courts to not interpret a statute in a way that will have particular consequences unless the statute makes unmistakably clear its intent to achieve that result. According to law professor William Popkin, such rules "insist that a particular result can be achieved only if the text…says so in no uncertain terms."Popkin, William. ''Statutes in Court: The History and Theory of Statutory Interpretation'' 73, 201 (1999). Protecting constitutional structure Clear statement rules are commonly applied in areas implicating the structural constitution, such as federalism, sovereign immunity, nondelegation, preemption, or federal spending with strings attached. This is especially true when there is a strong interest against implicit abridgment of traditional understandings. Sovereign immunity Congress can abrogate the states' sovereign immunity in some situations. However, it cannot do s ...
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Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) is the court of last resort, highest court in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although the claim is disputed by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the SJC claims the distinction of being the oldest continuously functioning appellate court in the Americas, with a recognized history dating to the establishment of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature in 1692 under the charter of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Although it was historically composed of four associate justices and one chief justice, the court is currently composed of six associate justices and one chief justice. History The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court traces its history back to the high court of the British Province of Massachusetts Bay, which was chartered in 1692. Under the terms of that charter, Governor Sir William Phips established the Superior Court of Judicature as the province's local court of last resort (some o ...
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Minnesota Supreme Court
The Minnesota Supreme Court is the Supreme court, highest court in the U.S. state of Minnesota. The court hears cases in the Supreme Court chamber in the Minnesota State Capitol or in the nearby Minnesota Judicial Center. History The court was first assembled as a three-judge panel in 1849 when Minnesota was still a Minnesota Territory, territory. The first members were lawyers from outside the region, appointed by President Zachary Taylor. The court system was rearranged when Minnesota became a state in 1858. Appeals from Minnesota District Courts went directly to the Minnesota Supreme Court until the Minnesota Court of Appeals, an intermediate appellate court, was created in 1983 to handle most of those cases. The court now considers about 900 appeals per year and accepts review in about one in eight cases. Before the Court of Appeals was created, the Minnesota Supreme Court handled about 1,800 cases a year. Certain appeals can go directly to the Supreme Court, such as those ...
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Stephen Breyer
Stephen Gerald Breyer ( ; born August 15, 1938) is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and replaced retiring justice Harry Blackmun. Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, was his designated successor. Breyer was generally associated with the liberal wing of the Court. He is now the Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process at Harvard Law School. Born in San Francisco, Breyer attended Stanford University, the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1964. After a clerkship with Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg in 1964–65, Breyer was a law professor and lecturer at Harvard Law School from 1967 until 1980. He specialized in administrative law, writing textbooks that remain in use today. He held other prominent positions before being nominated to the ...
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Elena Kagan
Elena Kagan ( ; born April 28, 1960) is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010, and has served since August 7, 2010. Kagan is the fourth woman to become a member of the Court. Kagan was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from Princeton University, Worcester College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, she clerked for a federal Court of Appeals judge and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She began her career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as a policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. After a nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which expired without action, she became a professor at Harvard Law School and was later named its first female dean. In 2009, Kagan became the first female solicitor general of the Unite ...
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Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. Foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering, but instead is in planes perpendicular to the direction of metamorphic compression. The foliation in slate is called "slaty cleavage". It is caused by strong compression causing fine grained clay flakes to regrow in planes perpendicular to the compression. When expertly "cut" by striking parallel to the foliation, with a specialized tool in the quarry, many slates will display a property called fissility, forming smooth flat sheets of stone which have long been used for roofing, floor tiles, and other purposes. Slate is frequently grey in color, especially when seen, en masse, covering roofs. However, slate occurs in a variety of colors even from a single locality; for ex ...
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Sua Sponte
In law, ''sua sponte'' (Latin: "of his, her, its or their own accord") or ''suo motu'' ("on its own motion") describes an act of authority taken without formal prompting from another party. The term is usually applied to actions by a judge taken without a prior motion or request from the parties. The form ''nostra sponte'' ("of our own accord") is sometimes used by the court itself, when the action is taken by a multi-member court, such as an appellate court, rather than by a single judge. (Third parties describing such actions would still refer to them as being taken by the court as a whole and therefore as 'sua sponte'.) While usually applied to actions of a court, the term may reasonably be applied to actions by government agencies and individuals acting in official capacity. One situation in which a party might encourage a judge to move ''sua sponte'' occurs when that party is preserving a special appearance (usually to challenge jurisdiction), and therefore cannot make motions ...
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Antonin Scalia
Antonin Gregory Scalia (; March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor. Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. A devout Catholic, he attended Xavier High School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. Scalia went on to graduate from Harvard Law School and spent six ...
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Lockhart V
Lockhart may refer to: *Lockhart (surname) Places Australia *Lockhart, New South Wales *Lockhart River, Queensland *Lockhart River, Western Australia United States *Lockhart, Alabama *Lockhart, Florida *Lockhart, Minnesota *Lockhart, South Carolina *Lockhart, Texas *Lockhart, West Virginia *Lockhart Township, Minnesota *Lockhart Stadium, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Other uses *Lockhart, a codename for the Xbox Series S video game console See also * Lockharts, California, United States * Lockheart Lockheart is a surname of British origin, which is a variant of the more common surname Lockhart Lockhart may refer to: *Lockhart (surname) Places Australia *Lockhart, New South Wales *Lockhart River, Queensland *Lockhart River, Western Austr ...
, a surname {{disambiguation, geo ...
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Legislative Supremacy
Parliamentary sovereignty, also called parliamentary supremacy or legislative supremacy, is a concept in the constitutional law of some parliamentary democracies. It holds that the legislative body has absolute sovereignty and is supreme over all other government institutions, including executive or judicial bodies. It also holds that the legislative body may change or repeal any previous legislation and so it is not bound by written law (in some cases, not even a constitution) or by precedent. In some countries, parliamentary sovereignty may be contrasted with separation of powers, which limits the legislature's scope often to general law-making and makes it subject to external judicial review, where laws passed by the legislature may be declared invalid in certain circumstances. Many states have sovereign legislatures, including the United Kingdom, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Barbados, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, an ...
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Hudud
''Hudud'' (Arabic: ''Ḥudūd'', also transliterated ''hadud'', ''hudood''; plural of ''hadd'', ) is an Arabic word meaning "borders, boundaries, limits". In the religion of Islam it refers to punishments that under Islamic law ( sharīʿah) are mandated and fixed by God as per Islam. These punishments were applied in pre-modern Islam,Wael Hallaq (2009), ''An introduction to Islamic law'', p.173. Cambridge University Press. . and their use in some modern states has been a source of controversy. Traditional Islamic jurisprudence divides crimes into offenses against God and those against man. The former are seen to violate God's ''hudud'' or "boundaries", and they are associated with punishments specified in the Quran and in some cases inferred from hadith. The offenses incurring ''hudud'' punishments are ''zina'' (unlawful sexual intercourse such as fornication), unfounded accusations of ''zina'', drinking alcohol, highway robbery, and some forms of theft. Jurists have differed ...
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