All articles starting with L
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Legal profession
The legal profession comprises licensed lawyers who advise, draft, negotiate, and represent clients. Key features: restricted practice of law, bar associations since 1870s, 1.37 million US lawyers in 2025, median pay $159,670.
Legal protection and welfare of cephalopods
Cephalopods such as octopuses and squid are among the few invertebrates legally recognized as sentient, protected in UK and EU research law since 2013, though not in fishing or farming.
Legal realism
Legal realism, in American and Scandinavian schools, is a jurisprudential approach treating law as judicial and social behavior studied empirically, associated with Holmes, Llewellyn, Frank, Hägerström, and Ross, opposed to formalism.
Legal recognition of non-binary gender
Legal recognition of non-binary gender: state acknowledgment of genders beyond male/female via markers like X, diverse, or third gender. Nepal (2007), India NALSA (2014), Germany (2018), Argentina recognize it; the UK and, since 2025, US passports do not.
Legal remedy
A legal remedy, also known as judicial relief, is the means by which a court enforces a right or redresses its violation, through damages, injunctions, or declaratory judgment.
Legal responses to agunah
Legal responses to agunah: measures freeing Jewish women (agunot) denied a get. Covers halakhic evidence leniencies, Israeli rabbinical court sanctions law, New York Get statutes, prenuptial agreements, and denominational solutions.
Legal separation
Legal separation, also called judicial separation, is an arrangement in which spouses live apart while remaining legally married, offered in England and Wales and most US states as an alternative to divorce.
Legal status of fictional pornography depicting minors
Legal status of fictional pornography depicting minors: drawn, animated, or AI-generated sexual imagery of apparent minors. US prosecutes under obscenity (18 USC 1466A) after Ashcroft 2002; UK s.62 CJA 2009 criminalizes possession; Japan excludes fictional children; Canada includes them.
Legal status of Germany
Legal status of Germany: post-1945 international-law position of the divided German state (FRG, GDR, Deutsches Reich continuity), the 1973 Basic Treaty ruling, and full sovereignty restored by the 1990 Two Plus Four Treaty.
Legal status of Hawaii
Legal status of Hawaii: the Kingdom of Hawaii (Ko Hawaiʻi Pae ʻĀina), US annexation by the 1898 Newlands Resolution, territorial status 1900-1959, 50th statehood under the 1959 Admission Act, and the sovereignty-continuity dispute.
Legal status of psilocybin mushrooms
Legal status of psilocybin mushrooms: Schedule I federally in the US since 1971, legalized for supervised therapeutic use in Oregon (2020) and Colorado (2022), spores federally uncontrolled, with medical access in Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and New Zealand.
Legal status of psychedelic drugs in the United States
US psychedelic drug law: psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, mescaline, DMT and ibogaine are Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, no FDA approval, while Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico run state programs under federal preemption.
Legal status of Salvia divinorum
Legal status of Salvia divinorum (diviner's sage): unscheduled under UN conventions and US federal law, DEA drug of concern, banned in Australia since 2002, Schedule IV in Canada, and controlled or regulated in many US states and European countries.
Legal status of Salvia divinorum in the United States
Salvia divinorum legality in the US: not scheduled under the federal Controlled Substances Act, DEA lists it as a drug of concern; roughly 27-29 states ban it, others restrict sale to minors or allow non-consumption use.
Legal status of transgender people
Legal status of transgender people: laws and court rulings on changing legal gender, from self-ID systems like Germany's 2024 Act and Nepal's 2007 ruling to medical-requirement regimes, plus anti-discrimination law, UN and Council of Europe standards, and the UK 2025 Equality Act ruling.
Legal supply categories of veterinary medicines
Legal supply categories of veterinary medicines are the classes a regulator assigns to control who may prescribe and sell a medicine, and whether a prescription is needed.
Legal system
A legal system is the set of institutions and rules a society uses to make and enforce law; the main families are civil law, common law, customary law, religious law, and hybrid systems, with quantitative taxonomies identifying four global clusters.
Legal system of Saudi Arabia
The legal system of Saudi Arabia (النظام القضائي السعودي) is based on Islamic Sharia under the Basic Law of Governance, with Sharia courts, the Board of Grievances, and new codes: Evidence Law 2021, Civil Transactions Law 2023.
Legal tender
Legal tender is money a debtor may lawfully offer in payment of a debt and a creditor may be obliged to accept, though shops can still refuse cash.
Legal Tender Cases
The Legal Tender Cases (Hepburn v. Griswold 1870; Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis 1871; Juilliard v. Greenman 1884) are Supreme Court decisions on whether Congress could make Civil War greenback paper money legal tender, upholding the power after reversing Hepburn.
Legal thriller
Legal thriller: a crime fiction subgenre built on trials, legal procedure, and lawyer protagonists, written mostly by legal professionals; defined by Gardner, Turow's Presumed Innocent (1987), and Grisham's bestsellers.
Legal-BERT
Legal-BERT is a family of BERT language models pre-trained on legal texts, released in 2020 by researchers at the Athens University of Economics and Business for legal NLP tasks.
Legalism (Chinese philosophy)
Legalism (fa jia, 法家) is the Warring States-era Chinese school of political thought holding that order comes from impersonal laws, standards, and incentives, not morality; associated with Shang Yang and Han Fei and the Qin empire.
Legaliteti
Legaliteti (Albanian: Lëvizja e Legalitetit, "Legality Movement") was an Albanian monarchist resistance movement founded in November 1943 under Abaz Kupi that fought to restore King Zog and opposed both the fascist occupation and the communist-led partisans.
Legality Campaign
The Legality Campaign (Campanha da Legalidade) was a Brazilian political and military mobilization led by Leonel Brizola in 1961 to guarantee Vice President João Goulart could take office.
Legality of cannabis
Legality of cannabis: the legal status of cannabis under the 1961 Single Convention and national laws, covering decriminalization, depenalization, and legalization models in Uruguay (2013), Canada (2018), US states, Malta, and Germany, with observed policy outcomes.
Legality of cannabis by U.S. jurisdiction
Legality of cannabis by U.S. jurisdiction: 24 states, two territories, and D.C. allow adult recreational use; most states allow medical use; federal law moved medical cannabis to Schedule III in 2026 while adult use remains Schedule I.
Legality of child pornography
Legality of child pornography, now often called child sexual abuse material (CSAM): criminalized in most jurisdictions under the 2000 UN Optional Protocol (178 parties) and national statutes in the US, UK, Canada, Germany and the EU, with current reforms on AI-generated and self-generated images.
Legality of euthanasia
The legality of euthanasia concerns when national law permits ending a person's life at their request; 13 countries had legal euthanasia or assisted suicide as of mid-2023.
Legality of incest
Legality of incest: whether criminal law bans sexual activity between relatives. Many systems criminalize even consensual adult incest; others, like New Jersey, do not. Covers 1908 England, Stuebing v. Germany, and prohibition rationales.