The year and a day rule has been a common traditional length of time for establishing differences in legal status.
The phrase "year and a day rule" is associated with the former common law standard that death could not be legally attributed to acts or omissions that occurred more than a year and a day before the death.
It is elsewhere associated with the minimum sentence for a crime to count as a felony.
Read more about Year And A Day Rule: The Rule and Homicide, As A Sentence For Felons, Other Legal and Quasi-legal Uses of Year and A Day
Famous quotes containing the words year, day and/or rule:
“Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“The fox, he felt, had never seen his past disposed of like a fall of water. He had never measured off his day in moments: another—another—another. But now, thrown down so deeply in himself, into the darkness of the well, surprised by pain and hunger, might he not revert to an earlier condition, regain capacities which formerly were useless to him, pass from animal to Henry, become human in his prison, X his days, count, wait, listen for another—another—another—another?”
—William Gass (b. 1924)
“And they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas, for England
They have no graves as yet.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)