Nolo contendere is a legal term that comes from the Latin phrase for "I do not wish to contend". It is also referred to as a plea of no contest or no defense.
In law as practiced in countries that follow the English models, a pleading is a formal written statement of one party's claims or defenses in response to another party's complaint(s) in a civil action. The parties' pleadings in a case define the issues to be adjudicated in the action.
Roman law is the legal system of ancient Rome, including the legal developments spanning over a thousand years of jurisprudence, from the Twelve Tables, to the Corpus Juris Civilis ordered by Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. Roman law forms the basic framework for civil law, the most widely used legal system today, and the terms are sometimes used synonymously. The historical importance of Roman law is reflected by the continued use of Latin legal terminology in many legal systems influenced by it, including common law.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure govern civil procedure in United States district courts. They are the companion to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Rules promulgated by the United States Supreme Court pursuant to the Rules Enabling Act become part of the FRCP unless, within seven months, the United States Congress acts to veto them. The Court's modifications to the rules are usually based upon recommendations from the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal judiciary's internal policy-making body.
David Dudley Field II was an American lawyer and law reformer who made major contributions to the development of American civil procedure. His greatest accomplishment was engineering the move away from common law pleading towards code pleading, which culminated in the enactment of the Field Code in 1850 by the state of New York.
Thomas Eugene Baker is a constitutional law scholar, Professor of Law, and founding member of the Florida International University College of Law. With four decades of teaching experience, Baker has authored eighteen books, including two leading casebooks, has published more than 200 scholarly articles in leading law journals, and has received numerous teaching awards.
Legal education in the United States generally refers to a graduate degree, the completion of which makes a graduate eligible to sit for an examination for a license to practice as a Lawyer. Around 60 percent of those who complete a law degree typically practice law, with the remainder primarily working in business or government or policy roles, where their degrees also confer advantages.
John Norton Pomeroy was an American lawyer, writer, and law professor. “Perhaps the most important text book writer of the last third of the nineteenth century,” Pomeroy is one of the foremost contributors to American jurisprudence on topics ranging from equity to municipal law.
David Rudovsky is a civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia. He is a founding partner, in 1971, of the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg and Lin, and a Senior Fellow at University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he teaches evidence and constitutional criminal procedure. In 1996, Rudovsky won Penn's Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence. In 1986 he was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for creative and ground-breaking work in jail reform and police misconduct litigation.
Diane Pamela Wood is an American attorney who serves as the director of the American Law Institute, a senior circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
Geoffrey Cornell Hazard Jr. was Trustee Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he taught from 1994 to 2005, and the Thomas E. Miller Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. He was also Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School.
Edward F. Sherman served as the 20th dean and is currently the W.R. Irby Chair in Law at the Tulane University Law School. He teaches Civil Procedure and Alternative Dispute Resolution. He was previously the Moise F. Steeg, Jr. Professor of Law at Tulane. He has taught at several other schools, including the University of Texas, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, and the University of London. Through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) he helped Vietnam write a new code of civil procedure. In 1970, he was a founding board member of the Lawyers Military Defense Committee, which provided free-of-charge civilian counsel to U.S. military members in Vietnam and West Germany.
Legal practice is sometimes used to distinguish the body of judicial or administrative precedents, rules, policies, customs, and doctrines from legislative enactments such as statutes and constitutions which might be called "laws" in the strict sense of being commands to the general public, rather than only to a set of parties.
Douglas Gordon Baird is an American legal scholar, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor and a former dean of the University of Chicago Law School. He joined the faculty in 1980 and served as the dean from 1994 to 1999. He is a leader in the field of bankruptcy law.
Civil procedure in the United States consists of rules that govern civil actions in the federal, state, and territorial court systems, and is distinct from the rules that govern criminal actions. Like much of American law, civil procedure is not reserved to the federal government in its Constitution. As a result, each state is free to operate its own system of civil procedure independent of her sister states and the federal court system.
The law of the United States comprises many levels of codified and uncodified forms of law, of which the most important is the nation's Constitution, which prescribes the foundation of the federal government of the United States, as well as various civil liberties. The Constitution sets out the boundaries of federal law, which consists of Acts of Congress, treaties ratified by the Senate, regulations promulgated by the executive branch, and case law originating from the federal judiciary. The United States Code is the official compilation and codification of general and permanent federal statutory law.
The California Code of Civil Procedure is a California code enacted by the California State Legislature in March 1872 as the general codification of the law of civil procedure in the U.S. state of California, along with the three other original Codes. It contains most California statutes that govern the filing and litigation of lawsuits in the Superior Courts of California, as well as legal notices that must be given in a variety of circumstances. It also includes statutes of limitations that control the period of time during which a lawsuit may be commenced. The Code originally governed the legal profession, but those were later moved to the Business and Professions Code.
Maynard E. Pirsig, LLD, was an American legal scholar. He was a professor, and dean, of the University of Minnesota Law School; a Minnesota Supreme Court justice; director of the Minnesota Legal Aid Society, and an advisor for the Indonesian, Puerto Rican, and El Salvadoran legal systems. He defined Legal Ethics in the 1974 Encyclopedia Britannica. His law books were widely used in schools across the country, including his casebook Judicial Administration--which Pirsig used for the United States' first law reform course, early 1930s. He was mentored by Everett Fraser, Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter.
James Harmon Chadbourn was an American legal scholar and an expert in civil procedure, Federal jurisdiction and evidence. He was a Fessenden Professor of law at Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1974.
Charles Sumner Lobingier was an American jurist who served as a judge of the Philippine Court of First Instance from 1904 to 1914 and as Judge of the United States Court for China in Shanghai from 1914 to 1924. He was also the author of a number of books on international and comparative law.
