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:
“Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.”
—Max Beerbohm (1872–1956)
“We accept and welcome ... as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”
—Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)