Terms you need to know

ACTUAL MALICE: To win a defamation suit, public officials or prominent people, such as political candidates or movie stars, must prove that the offender made a false statement with actual malice. This means the statement was made with knowledge that it was false or with serious doubts about whether it was true.

ASYLUM SEEKER: A foreigner, already in the U.S. or at the border, who seeks refuge, claiming an inability or unwillingness to return to the home country because of a well-founded fear of persecution.

BIFURCATION: Splitting a trial into two parts: a liability phase and a penalty phase. In some cases, a new jury may be empanelled to deliberate for the penalty phase.

COHABITATION AGREEMENT: Also called a living-together contract, a document that spells out the terms of a relationship and often addresses financial issues and how property will be divided if the relationship ends.

DISCOVERY: Part of the pre-trial litigation process during which each party requests relevant information and documents from the other side in an attempt to "discover" pertinent facts.

Autocracy

A system of government in which supreme political power to direct all the activities of the state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of coup d'etat or mass insurrection).

Coup d'etat

A quick and decisive extra-legal seizure of governmental power by a relatively small but highly organized group of political or military leaders, typically by means of the unexpected arrest or assassination of the incumbent chief executive and his principal supporters within the government.

Cabinet

A select group of state officials who each head one or more of the principal bureaucratic departments or agencies of the executive branch of government and who meet as a group from time to time for the purpose of discussing current policy proposals and advising the chief executive of their recommendations. (Chief executives usually also maintain one or more additional advisory councils that may well be more influential than the more formal cabinet.)

Budget

A statement of a government's planned or expected financial position for a specified period of time (usually one year) based on estimates of the expenditures to be made by the government's main subdivisions (wages and salaries of government employees; consultants' fees; purchases of equipment, supplies, real estate, etc.;

Commerce clause

The provision of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8, paragraph 3) that gives Congress the authority to regulate trade with foreign nations and among the states.

Common law

Legally binding rules or principles of justice developed in the course of history from the gradual accumulation of rulings by judges in individual cases, as differentiated from the kind of statute law embodied in special legal codes or statutes enacted by legislative assemblies or imposed by executive decrees. The importance of the common law heritage is particularly great in the legal systems of Great Britain and of most former British colonies, including the U.S.

Egalitarianism

A social philosophy or ideology placing primary stress on the value of human equality and advocating radical social reforms so as to eliminate all forms of economic, social and political inequality.