Law
In law, it is a term of art used to identify a legal classification that exists independently of other categorizations because of its singularity or due to the specific creation of an entitlement or obligation. For example, a court's contempt powers arise sui generis and not from statute or rule. The New York Court of Appeals has used the term in describing cooperative apartment corporations, mostly because this form of housing is considered real property for some purposes and personal property for other purposes.
When citing cases and other authorities, lawyers and judges may say a sui generis case, or a sui generis authority, meaning it is a special one confined to its own facts, and therefore may not be of broader application. This is the modern view courts are holding when deciding judgments based on oil and gas leases.
Read more about this topic: Sui Generis
Famous quotes containing the word law:
“At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.”
—Edgar Quinet (1803–1875)
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—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)