What is the difference between the terms defendant and Respondent? It seems that there is perhaps a trend toward less adversarial terminology, so I wonder if it is that defendant was a more traditional term used exclusively historically, while Respondent has now begun to be used in some contexts as a reflection of this trend toward less adversarial terminology. Is this at all accurate of a description of how that split has come to be? In any event, what contexts tend to use which term nowadays? And why?
Defendant is normally used as the opposing party to a plaintiff, in a civil cause of action. It also refers to the accused in a criminal matter. Respondent is normally used as the responding party to an applicant, in motions, in certain statutory relief, relief based in judicial review, etc. It is also used to refer to the opposing party to petitioners in various statutory and equitable matters (and in some jurisdictions, there is little to no distinction between petitions and applications). Before administrative adjudicative tribunals and in alternative dispute processes, respondent is often the party that is not the claimant. A plaintiff or defendant may also either be an applicant or respondent on various motions at different times throughout the litigation. Respondent also refers to the non-appellant party or parties on appeal. There are likely other contexts that I am missing. For more, look to the rules, practice directives, or forms for the particular forum and process you are wondering about.
This is a perfectly common question. &quot;What is your full name?&quot; &quot;Do you have any aliases?&quot; &quot;What other names do you go by?&quot; Like any other question, though, it must be relevant, and you should be prepared to explain why it is relevant. If the court allows the question, the defendant must answer.
The parties can be required under oath to explain what they understand the plain meaning of the words to be. Where they disagree about the plain meaning of the words, they can use expert witnesses to give weight to their interpretation. Once the judge determines the plain meaning of the words (either by agreement between the parties or by reference to expert witnesses or other evidence), it is a matter of standard contract interpretation. Even in the case of an idioticon, where no expert witnesses are available, if the disagreement between the parties surrounds only a few words, the judge could find that there is no actual ambiguity because the context. Also, the judge could refer to parole evidence if needed. The purpose of the written contract is to provide evidence of your agreement. It is a bad idea to create evidence that you both may want to rely upon at some point if nobody else can understand it.
This is largely congruent with* the doctrine of laches. The basic idea, under common law, is that you can lose rights by failing to assert them. This is generally important for many reasons, but specifically in the case of appeals: The argument should have been brought before the trial court. Justice is not a game, but it's important to recognize that the party trying to raise the argument had an opportunity to do so already. They have given up their right to raise this argument, and extending them the privilege of doing so is (for the following reasons) not good for the system. Courts of appeals are typically not well-equipped to evaluate factual evidence. It is not their area of expertise. Witnesses or evidence may be less available. It's just not practical to try to adjudicate factual issues on appeal, most of the time. If anyone could get an appeal by bringing new factual arguments, then everyone would do that. You'd bring your strongest argument before the district court, and then if that fails, bring the second strongest before the circuit court. That way, you get an extra trial. This is inefficient. Allowing factual arguments on appeal would encourage attorneys and their clients to strategically bring different facts before different courts. This kind of forum-shopping is harmful because it has little to do with who has the stronger overall case, and more to do with who has the better lawyer. * "Congruent with" is not the same as "an instance of"; this rule is not formally an application of laches. It just happens to share the same justification.
The Louisiana Civil Code of 1870 (it was revised between 1868-1869, but enacted in 1870) applied specifically to civil cases (i.e. disputes between private parties); it's organized by topic area, and is there to keep people from having to comb through every law ever passed that has to do with civil cases. The Revised Statutes of 1870 gathered all the laws of "general character" into one place, for the same reason. The difference between the two was almost certainly an error. In general, there is one official version of the law; other versions are a convenience. The official version normally defaults to the individual laws passed by the legislature (which are organized by date, not by anything useful for finding relevant laws), but that can be changed by statute. In this case, the Revised Statutes contains section 3990, which says in so far as there may be any conflict between the provisions of this act and any provision of the said Revised Civil Code and Code of Practice, that said Code shall be held and taken as the law governing So, the Civil Code took precedence. Your revisions of 1876 and 1882 were not successor laws; rather, they were compilations of the Revised Statutes and Civil Code of 1870 with the amendments to those that had since been passed. The Revised Statutes from 1876 were really the Revised Statutes of 1870, modified by later laws (that didn't touch the divorce provisions). Likewise, the Civil Code from 1882 was really the Revised Civil Code of 1870, modified by later laws. The Civil Code of 1870 still took precedence over the Revised Statutes of 1870, so the divorce provisions of the Civil Code were authoritative.
if necessary it is possible to simplify it to USA vs EU The European Union is by no means a homogeneous area of law. I will assume france because it is the one I am most familiar with, but bear in mind that much of what follows might not apply to Spain/Germany/etc. The USA is a federal state. In particular, Louisiana law is heavily influenced by civil law for historical reasons. Other states and federal law do, however, follow more or less the same general principles. in common law there is the idea of a precedent, while in civil law not The first part is true. Common law usually hold the principle of stare decisis according to which precedents are binding. That means that the holding of a court binds the same court to rule the same way on similar matters raised later. I would note, however, that courts can be... let’s say &quot;creative&quot;... in finding ways to differentiate the case at hand from the previous one, when the judge is motivated to do so. The latter part is false, or at least, exaggerated. It is true that courts in civil law are not bound by previous holdings; an appeal that raises as its only argument &quot;the court’s decision in my case was different from that in another case without offering any differentiation&quot; would be rejected. However, there is the concept of jurisprudence constante where repeated precedent is highly persuasive. In practice, even simple precedent is persuasive. Furthermore, lower courts are bound by the holdings of higher courts, both in civil law and common law jurisdictions. (That’s more or less the meaning of &quot;higher court&quot;.) in common law a judge plays a role of a person evidence at a court is provided to, while in civil law a judge tries to investigate too in addition That is a distinction between the inquisitorial and adversarial systems. The distinction does not exactly map to the civil/common law systems, but in practice the criminal part of civil law systems is often inquisitorial whereas common law systems are often adversarial. I will first note that the &quot;inquisitorial&quot; part where the judge conducts investigations is vastly overblown. That only occurs in complex cases that require extended investigations with more coercitive powers (for instance seizing documents etc.) Wikipedia says: In 2005, there were 1.1 million criminal rulings in France, while only 33,000 new cases were investigated by judges.[5] The vast majority of cases are therefore investigated directly by law enforcement agencies under the supervision of [the equivalent of district attorneys]. The numbers sound plausible to me, but here’s the ref it gives if you want to check (which I did not bother to do). The most visible part of the distinction is the way witnesses at trial are handled. In an adversarial system, the parties will ask to cite certain witnesses. There are pre-trial motions to exclude certain witnesses for certain reasons, but parties have a wide latitude of which witnesses they want to call. Each witness will come labelled as to which party asked for its appearance. At trial, the witness will be asked questions by the party who called them (direct examination), which will usually take a long time and include nondisputed background information (who are you, for how long have you worked with the defendant, etc.). Then, the opposing party will ask questions (cross-examination), emphasizing points that cast doubt on the witness’s reliability (because they are lying, because they do not remember well, etc.) or on the other parties’ narrative (highlighting details that were conveniently &quot;missed&quot; in direct examination). In an inquisitorial system, witnesses are chosen by the judge. Parties can ask to have witnesses added to the list, but the list does not come with labels that X is coming from the prosecution, Y from the defense. When a witness is called, the judge will ask most of the questions at the start, before giving the floor to the parties. Roughly speaking, the judge does the direct examination, and parties do a cross-examination afterwards. Note that in many cases the parties will ask few or no questions - high-profile cases that you read about in the media are abnormal in that respect. In particular, an inquisitorial-system court maintains a list of expert witnesses, which are called when technical points are required. That expert is paid by the court, not by the parties (however, when one party requests an expertise and the other party opposes it, the requesting party has to pay the cost upfront - they will shift it to the other party if they win the case). That is very different to the adversarial system of having each party introduce testimony by an expert they commissioned and paid. distance between public law and private law is smaller in common law legal system I am not sure I understand that question. It is true that &quot;private&quot; (tort) law operates in an adversarial system both in civil-law and common-law. Therefore, one could argue that the distance between civil-law’s criminal system (inquisitorial) and tort system (adversarial) is higher than between common-law’s criminal and tort systems (both adversarial). However, that is in my view a highly artificial distinction. The distance between practice areas within a single (common law or civil law) jurisdiction is large in any case. You would not want a lawyer specialized in drug-dealing cases to take your case about sexual harassment or unlawful dismissal, and vice-versa, in any jurisdiction.
You asked, &quot;could that guy as defendant claim self defense and win?&quot; First let's try to make it clear what is meant by &quot;win&quot;. In the Rittenhouse trial, the defendant was charged of the following crimes: First-degree reckless homicide First-degree recklessly endangering safety (x2) First-degree intentional homicide Attempted first-degree intentional homicide Possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 (dismissed) Failure to comply with an emergency order from state or local government (dismissed) Rather than thinking of the defendant as a &quot;winner&quot;, it might be more appropriate to say that he was &quot;acquitted&quot; of these charges. If someone that was involved in the conflict fired first, as you described here: &quot;They encounter each other when each is leaning or reaching or tripping, or whatever it would take for them to unintentionally point their gun at your head. You react and you raise your gun in defense, he spots your move and points his at you. You both fire. You shoot each other and you both are gravely injured. Like, paralyzed&quot;, then would they also be acquitted of all of the non-dismissed charges listed above? If everything was as you described (&quot;unintentional&quot;, &quot;reactionary&quot;, and &quot;in defense&quot;), then likely they would also not be found guilty of those crimes. It's not like they would &quot;win&quot;, it's more like they will not be found guilty of committing one of those crimes. The precise outcome will depend on all the facts involved in the case, and the jury's decision based on those facts. So there is no single answer that always applies to every situation, but it sounds like you're wondering about some hypothetical situation that appears to be paradoxical because in this case only one person was charged with crimes: if someone else was the first shooter, the sequence of following events would first of all depend on whether or not they got charged with a crime, and I wouldn't characterize the outcome as a &quot;win&quot; or &quot;lose&quot; but as an &quot;acquittal&quot; or &quot;conviction&quot;, and yes it is possible to be acquitted if everything is &quot;accidental&quot; as you described, and presumably not &quot;reckless&quot; (often meaning that a reasonable person in the same situation would have done the same thing). About your more broad question: &quot;Is mutual self defense a thing?&quot; It depends on what crime is being charged against the defendant. In the Rittenhouse case there was only one person that was charged. If you're asking about a hypothetical situation in which two people involved in a 1-on-1 conflict both claim self-defense, I hope I can assume that they were both charged with a crime against which to defend themselves in court in the first place. It is indeed possible for a State to prosecute both parties of a 1-on-1 physical conflict, and for both of them to successfully claim self-defense in order to eventually be both acquitted. It wouldn't be called &quot;mutual self-defense&quot;, but each defendant would make their own self-defense case individually.
In appellate cases, the party appealing is called the "petitioner", and the other party is called the "respondent". These cases are listed Petitioner v. Respondent. In your example, Twombly was the original plaintiff, and Bell was the defendant in a class-action. This initial action would have been referred to as Twombly v. Bell. The case was dismissed by the trial court. Twombly appealed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. This action would have been still been called Twombly v. Bell, since Twombly was the party petitioning for the appeal. The 2nd Circuit agreed with Twombly, and reversed the district court's decision. Bell, then on the losing side, decided to appeal to the US Supreme Court. Because Bell was the petitioner in this action, Bell gets listed first.