Legal Concepts — Law, Custom, Justice, Right, Duty, Wrong, Remedy, Fact, Person, Offence, State, Plaint, Complaint, Suit, Affidavit, Judgment, Appeal, Review, Revision, Reference, Writ, Stay

Your landlord sends a notice, your friend says she will “file a case”, and the newspaper reports that the High Court has “stayed” something. Three sentences, and each hides a word that means something exact in law. A “case” can be a plaint, a complaint or a writ petition, and each one starts a different kind of journey. This topic gives you the working vocabulary of a courtroom, so that when you meet a word in a judgment you know what it is, who uses it, and what happens next.

In two minutes

Legal language is precise: each of these words names a specific thing in a specific procedure, and most marks are lost by using one word for another — a complaint for a plaint, a review for an appeal, a judgment for a decree.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Legal Language on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.