Legal advice

Legal advice is the giving of a professional or formal opinion regarding the substance or procedure of the law in relation to a particular factual situation.

Legal advice is ordinarily provided in exchange for financial or other tangible compensation. Advice given without remuneration is normally referred to as being pro bono publico (in the public good), or simply pro bono.

In the common law systems it is usually received from a solicitor, barrister or lawyer; in civil law systems it is given by advocates, lawyers or other professionals (such as tax experts, professional advisors, atc.).

In some countries, legal advice is subject to the possession of a specific licence, in others, it is simply subject to the general regulation of professional obligation and can be provided by any person, that will usually be legally responsible for the provided advice. The UK's Legal Services Act 2007 includes the giving of legal advice within the definition of unreserved legal activities, which means that it can be provided by any person not just an officer of the court. However, if it is provided by a lawyer or another person authorised by one of the front line legal services regulators, then this activity is included within their regulatory reach.

Legal Information Institute

The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a non-profit, public service of Cornell Law School that provides no-cost access to current American and international legal research sources online at law.cornell.edu. The organization is a pioneer in the delivery of legal information online. Founded in 1992 by Peter Martin and Tom Bruce, LII was the first law site developed on the internet. LII electronically publishes on the Web the U.S. Code, U.S. Supreme Court opinions, Uniform Commercial Code, the US Code of Federal Regulations, several Federal Rules, and a variety of other American primary law materials. LII also provides access to other national and international sources, such as treaties and United Nations materials. As of 2014, it had 18 million unique visitors per year.

Since its inception, the Legal Information Institute has inspired others around the world to develop namesake operations. These services are part of the Free Access to Law Movement.

History

LII was established in 1992 at Cornell Law School by Professor Peter Martin and Tom Bruce with a $250,000 multi-year startup grant from the National Center for Automated Information Research. The LII was originally based on Gopher and provided access to United States Supreme Court decisions and the US Code. Its original mission included the intent to "carry out applied research on the use of digital information technology in the distribution of legal information,...[and t]o make law more accessible." In the early years of LII, Bruce developed Cello the first web browser for Microsoft windows. Cello was released on 8 June 1993. In 1994 LII moved from Gopher to the Web. Since 2007 the IRS has distributed its IRS Tax Products DVD with LII's version of 26 USC (Internal Revenue Code).

Noun

A noun (from Latin nōmen, literally meaning "name") is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Linguistically, a noun is a member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition.

Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

History

Word classes (parts of speech) were described by Sanskrit grammarians from at least the 5th century BC. In Yāska's Nirukta, the noun (nāma) is one of the four main categories of words defined.

The Ancient Greek equivalent was ónoma (ὄνομα), referred to by Plato in the Cratylus dialog, and later listed as one of the eight parts of speech in The Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax (2nd century BC). The term used in Latin grammar was nōmen. All of these terms for "noun" were also words meaning "name". The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman noun.

Cornell Law School

Cornell Law School is the law school of Cornell University, a private Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York. It is one of the five Ivy League law schools and offers three law degree programs (JD, LLM, and JSD) along with several dual-degree programs in conjunction with other professional schools at the university.

Cornell Law has the third lowest faculty-to-student ratio (10.4 to 1) of ABA–accredited law schools in the United States, and for the Class of 2014, 95.8% of graduates obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after graduation.

History

The Law Department at Cornell opened in 1887 in Morrill Hall with Judge Douglas Boardman as its first dean. At that time, admission did not require even a high school diploma. In 1917, two years of undergraduate education were required for admission, and in 1924, it became a graduate degree program. The department was renamed the Cornell Law School in 1925. In 1890, George Washington Fields graduated, one of the first law-school-graduates of color in the United States. In 1893, Cornell had its first female graduate, Mary Kennedy Brown. Future Governor, Secretary of State, and Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, was a professor of law at Cornell from 1891–1893, and after returning to legal practice he continued to teach at the law school as a special lecturer from 1893–1895. The law school’s residence hall is named in honor of Hughes.

Law school

A law school (also known as a law centre or college of law) is an institution specializing in legal education, usually involved as part of a process for becoming a lawyer within a given jurisdiction.

Law degrees

Brazil

In Brazil, law is studied as an undergraduate program. Students who succesfully complete such programs are awarded a Bachelor of Law and are allowed to take the bar examination, which is held twice a year on a nation-wide basis. Candidates who pass the examination are then allowed to work as attorneys.

Canada

The oldest civil law faculty in Canada offering law degrees was established in 1848 at McGill University in Montreal, and the oldest common law faculty in Canada offering law degrees was established in 1883 at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The typical law degree required to practice law in Canada is now the Juris Doctor, which requires previous university coursework and is similar to the first law degree in the United States. There is some scholarly content in the coursework (such as an academic research paper required in most schools). The programs consist of three years, and have similar content in their mandatory first year courses. Beyond first year and the minimum requirements for graduation, course selection is elective with various concentrations such as business law, international law, natural resources law, criminal law, Aboriginal law, etc. Some schools, however, have not switched from LL.B. to the J.D. – one notable university that still awards the LL.B is McGill University.