9,901 articles
Legal effects of adoption in the United States
In the United States, a decree of adoption creates a legal parent-child relationship with an adoptive parent and generally ends the prior legal parent-child relationship, except in stepparent or second-parent adoptions.
Legal guardian
Legal guardian: a court-appointed fiduciary who makes personal or property decisions for a ward, a minor or incapacitated adult. Covers Roman and common law origins, duties, oversight, US foster-care guardianship statutes, and comparisons with adoption and custody.
Legal history of cannabis in Canada
Legal history of cannabis in Canada: prohibition from 1923, medical legalization in 2000, and the Cannabis Act of October 17, 2018, which made Canada the first major industrialized country to legalize recreational cannabis.
Legal history of cannabis in the United States
Legal history of cannabis in the United States: from legal 19th-century medicine to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, CSA Schedule I (1970), state medical and recreational legalization, and the 2024 Schedule III rescheduling proposal.
Legal issues in airsoft
Legal issues in airsoft cover replica-firearm regulation: US federal orange-tip marking under 15 USC 5001, state and city bans, Canadian and Australian restrictions, UK VCRA rules, police-encounter risks, and product liability.
Legal issues of Chris Brown
Legal issues of Chris Brown: criminal and civil matters involving the R&B singer, from the 2009 Rihanna felony assault conviction through the 2026 London nightclub affray guilty plea, probation violations, and the dismissed Warner Bros. defamation suit.
Legal liability
Legal liability is the state of being legally answerable for a wrong or a debt, so a court can require payment of damages or another sanction.
Legal person
Legal person: any human or non-human entity, such as a corporation, treated as a person able to sue, own property, and contract. Rooted in Roman universitas and medieval persona ficta, affirmed in Salomon v Salomon.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
Legality of incest in the United States
Incest laws in the United States: every state bans incestuous marriage, nearly all criminalize incest between close relatives, with New Jersey and Rhode Island not prosecuting consensual adult incest and Ohio limiting its statute to parent-child relationships.
Legality of the Iraq War
Legality of the Iraq War: whether the 19 March 2003 US-led invasion (Operation Iraqi Freedom) was lawful under the UN Charter. Turned on the disputed 'revival' of SCR 678 via SCR 1441, absent Security Council authorization, preemptive self-defense arguments, and the Chilcot Inquiry's 'far from satisfactory' UK legal justification.
Legally binding memoranda of understanding in international law
A legally binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) is an international agreement that constitutes a treaty under international law despite its informal title, as the ICJ confirmed in Somalia v Kenya.
Legislative appointment of state supreme court justices
Legislative appointment is a judicial selection method in which a state legislature chooses supreme court justices, now used fully only in South Carolina and Virginia.
Legitimacy (family law)
Legitimacy in family law is a child's legal status based on parents' marriage at birth, historically tied to the marital presumption of paternity, legitimation by subsequent marriage, inheritance rights, and twentieth-century reforms abolishing illegitimacy distinctions.
Legitimacy of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
Legitimacy of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, also called Operation Allied Force or the Kosovo air campaign: the 1999 bombing lacked UN Security Council authorization and was judged 'illegal but legitimate' by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo.
Legitime
Legitime (legitima portio, legitime, forced share): the legally reserved minimum portion of an estate owed to close family despite a will, rooted in Roman law's legitimata and querela inofficiosi testamenti, and today the basis of forced heirship in civil law countries.