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cerebral palsy

(Encyclopedia)cerebral palsy sərēˈbrəl pôlˈzē [key], disability caused by brain damage before or during birth or in the first years, resulting in a loss of voluntary muscular control and coordination. Althou...

treason

(Encyclopedia)treason, legal term for various acts of disloyalty. The English law, first clearly stated in the Statute of Treasons (1350), originally distinguished high treason from petit (or petty) treason. Petit ...

affirmative action

(Encyclopedia)affirmative action, in the United States, programs to overcome the effects of past societal discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women....

obscenity

(Encyclopedia)obscenity, in law, anything that tends to corrupt public morals by its indecency. The moral concepts that the term connotes vary from time to time and from place to place. In the United States, the wo...

no-fault insurance

(Encyclopedia)no-fault insurance, type of indemnity plan, usually applied to automobile coverage, in which those injured in an accident receive direct payment from the company with which they themselves are insured...

Austin, John

(Encyclopedia)Austin, John, 1790–1859, English jurist. He served (1826–32) as professor of jurisprudence at the Univ. of London, and his lectures were published (with additional material) as The Province of Jur...

McCullers, Carson

(Encyclopedia)McCullers, Carson, 1917–67, American novelist, b. Columbus, Ga. as Lula Carson Smith, studied at Columbia. The central theme of her novels is the spiritual isolation that underlies the human conditi...

asparagus

(Encyclopedia)asparagus, perennial garden vegetable (Asparagus officinalis) of the family Liliaceae (lily family), native to the E Mediterranean area and now naturalized over much of the world. As in the other spec...

Warren, Samuel

(Encyclopedia)Warren, Samuel, 1807–77, English lawyer and author. He wrote many legal texts, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1832), and the extremely popular novel Ten Thousand a Year (1841). ...

damages

(Encyclopedia)damages, money award that the judgment of a court requires the defendant in a suit to pay to the plaintiff as compensation for the loss or injury inflicted. Damages are the form of legal redress most ...