Word Finder - law

definition

The body of binding rules and regulations, customs and standards established in a community by its legislative and judicial authorities.

example

entrapment is against the law

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A binding regulation or custom established in a community in this way.

example

A new law forbids driving on that road.

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(more generally) A rule, such as:

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The control and order brought about by the observance of such rules.

example

It was a territory without law, marked by violence.

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A person or group that act(s) with authority to uphold such rules and order (for example, one or more police officers).

example

Here comes the law — run!

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The profession that deals with such rules (as lawyers, judges, police officers, etc).

example

He is studying for a career in law.

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Jurisprudence, the field of knowledge which encompasses these rules.

example

She went to university to study law.

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Litigation, legal action (as a means of maintaining or restoring order, redressing wrongs, etc).

example

They were quick to go to law.

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An allowance of distance or time (a head start) given to a weaker (human or animal) competitor in a race, to make the race more fair.

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One of two metaphysical forces ruling the world in some fantasy settings, also called order, and opposed to chaos.

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An oath sworn before a court, especially disclaiming a debt. (Chiefly in the phrases "wager of law", "wage one's law", "perform one's law", "lose one's law".)

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To work as a lawyer; to practice law.

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To prosecute or sue (someone), to litigate.

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To rule over (with a certain effect) by law; govern.

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To enforce the law.

definition

To subject to legal restrictions.

In contrast, courts of law apply the law to everyone.

I know the law very well, mates!

They see themselves as defining law, not breaking it.

Courts of law are now the norm in the world, with laws being democratically established and widely published.

Is there a logical end to that—a physical or economic law of some kind that says only 10 percent or 20 percent or 30 percent of people can ever be this wealthy?

But that wasn't how the law would see things.

You're a law officer.

I also have an offer to work at the law office where I worked last summer.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

Especially if the law gives him an okay.

He alone did not obey the law of immutability in the enchanted, sleeping castle.

I'm just looking for a job in law enforcement.

Demon Law offers you no protection, Death's mate or not.

But neither seriously considered contacting the law, especially because the law was Acting Sheriff Fitzgerald.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist, nor any conception of historical events.

Ethel was once again making a daily print appearance, concentrating on the subject of mystic tips, and soliciting comments from law enforcement agencies.

The establishment of this simple and obvious law should be enough.

Nightmares persist with the dogs of the law in never ending pursuit.

Around 1600, the Elizabethan Poor Law came into effect and lasted more than two centuries.

All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and simple law--the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God.

The serious condition of recruiting was quickly noticed, and the tabulation of each years results was followed by a new draft law, but no solution was achieved until a special commission assembled.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

He was himself fined for possessing a larger share of the public land than his own law allowed.

General Grant had served two terms (1869-1877), and the unwritten law of custom condemned his being given another.

Mahommed in fact represented a revolt against the anthropomorphism of commonplace Mahommedan orthodoxy, but he was a rigid predestinarian and a strict observer of the law.

After studying the arts at Toulouse and law at Orleans and Bologna, he became a canon at Bordeaux and then vicar-general to his brother the archbishop of Lyons, who in 1294 was created cardinal bishop of Albano.

Meaning in general the "king's court," it is difficult to define the curia regis with precision, but it is important and interesting because it is the germ from which the higher courts of law, the privy council and the cabinet, have sprung.

His widow left a sum of Ioo,000 francs to the Institut de France, to found in his memory scholarships in political economy or law.

When the law speaks universally, and something happens which is not according to the common course of events, it is right that the law should be modified in its application to that particular case, as the lawgiver himself would have done, if the case had been present to his mind.

Equity as thus described would correspond rather to the judicial discretion which modifies the administration of the law than to the antagonistic system which claims to supersede the law.

The part played by equity in the development of law is admirably illustrated in the well-known work of Sir Henry Maine on Ancient Law.

Positive law, at least in progressive societies, is constantly tending to fall behind public opinion, and the expedients adopted for bringing it into harmony therewith are three, viz, legal fictions, equity and statutory legislation.

After having been the law of the Church of France for a century, it was denounced by the French government in 1905.

The first is " the law that thought is a function of the brain."

The number of penal proceedings, especially those within the competence of praetors, has also increased,, chiefly on account of the frequency of minor contraventions of the law referred to in the section Crime.

But it is a cognate Law.

This law was probably only intended to be of a temporary character.

Then comes the law of Gratian already noticed.

It is due to the influence of the laisser faire doctrine that we regard law and regulation as a restraint on liberty.

Equity here is defined to mean "any body of rules existing by the side of the original civil law, founded on distinct principles, and claiming incidentally to supersede the civil law in virtue of a superior sanctity inherent in those principles."

It is thus different from legal fiction, by which a new rule is introduced surreptitiously, and under the pretence that no change has been made in the law, and from statutory legislation, in which the obligatory force of the rule is not supposed to depend upon its intrinsic fitness.

The connexion in Roman law between the ideas of equity, nature, natural law and the law common to all nations, and the influence of the Stoical philosophy on their development, are fully discussed in the third chapter of the work we have referred to.

The agency by which these principles were introduced was the edicts of the praetor, an annual proclamation setting forth the manner in which the magistrate intended to administer the law during his year of office.

The real beginning of English equity is to be found in the custom of handing over to that officer, for adjudication, the complaints which were addressed to the king, praying for remedies beyond the reach of the common law.

One cause of this separation was the rigid adherence to precedent on the part of the common law courts.

Another was the jealousy prevailing in England against the principles of the Roman law on which English equity to a large extent was founded.

From that time certainly equity, like common law, has professed to take its principles wholly from recorded decisions and statute law.

The view (traceable no doubt to the Aristotelian definition) that equity mitigates the hardships of the law where the law errs through being framed in universals, is to be found in some of the earlier writings.

It is impossible to make any general law which will work with every particular act and not fail in some circumstances.