- sua sponte --"on his own" A situation in which a judge will make a legal determination without being formally requested to do so by a party to the case.
- mitigation --compensation. One must do whatever one can to limit one's own injury.
- arguendo --"just for argument" One of those legal terms that's there only for the sake of sounding pretentious.
- res ipsa loquitur --"the thing speaks for itself" The self-evident rule of negligence. If one has exclusive control over whatever caused an injury, than one is presumed to be negligent regardless of proof of an act of negligence.
- loss of consortium --er, loss of the...carnal benefits of marriage. This typically arises in cases of wrongful death or personal injury.
- putative --regularly understood. Generally used in reference to paternity.
- collateral estoppel --a case cannot be tried twice on the same facts. In other words, if you don't like the result of your lawsuit, you can't keep moving from court to court to try to "improve" things.
- subsequent remedial measures This is a Federal Rule of Evidence, number 407.
- RICO --Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization. The Mafia statute. Or, more accurately, the anti-Mafia statute.
- constructive easement --a type of easement, which is the right to use someone else's property (i.e. real estate) for a specific purpose. The term "constructive", when used in a legal sense, refers to a fiction--God, this is getting confusing--based on the facts. So a constructive easement is one like...a culvert. The city water department is presumed to have a constructive easement for the purpose of running a culvert through a piece of property, because without that culvert, the property would be useless as residential real estate. There is no actual easement--no paper is signed, no money changes hands--but the fiction is created and (basically) respected on both sides.
- implied warranty of habitability --even a crappy apartment must be safe and livable.
- sine qua non --that without which.... My favorite legal term, and prehaps one of my favorite phrases, of all time. (Such eloquence!) The necessary (albeit not necessarily sufficient!) condition.
"The finding that the defendant had committed the crime was made sua sponte."
"She could see what was coming and stepped off the bridge before he could cut the last strand, in order to mitigate the damage to herself."
"Assuming arguendo that the best way to hide is in plain sight, is it logically reasonable that one who claims to have nothing to hide, actually does?"
"Res ipsa loquitur is sufficient to ascribe the child's injury to the crazed monkey with the gun."
"She was liable not only for the criminal damage to property caused by her accident, but also for the loss of consortium incurred by the significant other of each adult killed in the incident."
"He awoke on the couch, wondering if this was the morning that his status would change from that of putative to literal fatherhood."
"Collateral estoppel prevented him from being tried twice for the murder."
"When, after an injury or harm allegedly caused by an event, measures are taken that, if taken previously, would have made the injury or harm less likely to occur, evidence of the subsequent measures is not admissible to prove negligence, culpable conduct, a defect in a product, a defect in a product's design, or a need for a warning or instruction. This rule does not require the exclusion of evidence of subsequent measures when offered for another purpose, such as proving ownership, control, or feasibility of precautionary measures, if controverted, or impeachment." See expertpages.com for more Federal Rules of Evidence.
In other words, if something bad happens, and you're going to be sued for it, and you subsequently remedy the situation which is alleged to have caused the injury over which you are being sued, your subsequent remedial measures cannot be used as evidence against you in that original suit. The idea is that there is a social utility at work when you go ahead and fix the crack in your sidewalk or repair the broken slats in your fence through which the neighbor kid slipped in order to get to your swimming pool...and drown.
"He was lucky: FREv407 saved his bacon when he hung curtains and frosted the glass; those subsequent remedial measures may have prevented future, and more deadly, accidents."
"He thought that he led a sedate life, but the RICO boys were watching him--and his girl."
"You can be an antisocial weirdo and live in the woods and ramble incoherently about the government trying to steal your land because they want a constructive easement for a sewer line, or you can accept it and pee in peace."
"The implied warranty of habitability was breached by the slumlord when we moved into our first apartment together, but we didn't care--because we knew we could live on love alone."
"The sine qua non for proving the imagined to be true is to live it, but sometimes what makes the imaginary seem true is the very fact that it's been imagined: it is only imaginary, and so cannot be true, by its nature."
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