Ponzi schemes are a type of investment fraud in which investors are promised artificially high rates of return with little or no risk. Original investors and the perpetrators of the fraud are paid off by funds from later investors, but there...
civil procedure
popular action
Popular action, also called a qui tam action, is where a plaintiff brings a lawsuit on behalf of the government.
In State ex rel. Leibowitz v. Family Vision Care, LLC, the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, Second...
post-answer default judgment
A post-answer default judgment is a legal ruling issued by a court when a defendant, who has already filed an timely answer to the plaintiff’s complaint in a lawsuit, fails to appear at trial or otherwise present a defense on the merits. In...
postjudgment interest
Interest on a court judgment that a creditor, usually the plaintiff in the case, can collect from the debtor, usually the defendant, from time the judgment is entered in the court clerk's record until the judgment is paid. In federal court, under 28 U....
praecipe
One of various kinds of writs that prompts some sort of action. The word comes from the Latin word praecipio, meaning “I command (or order) [this],” and it often appears in the term “writ of praecipe.”
In the US, praecipes are writs that have one...
pray
An antiquated term of art used to describe a formal request for judicial judgment, relief, or damages at the end of a pleading, i.e. a civil complaint. For example, in Chasin v. Richey, a 1957 Florida Supreme Court case, the Court stated that “under...
prayer for relief
The prayer for relief is the part of complaint where a plaintiff states the damages or other remedies it is seeking from the court in a lawsuit. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8(a)(3) requires that a plaintiff’s...
precedent
Precedent refers to a court decision that is considered an authority for deciding subsequent cases involving identical or similar facts, or similar legal issues. Precedent is incorporated into the doctrine of stare decisis and requires courts...
preemption
Preemption is a doctrine in constitutional law that applies when two authorities conflict with one another. It refers to the idea that a higher authority of law will displace the law of a lower authority of law when the two authorities come...
prejudgment interest
The interest that a creditor, usually a plaintiff in the case, is entitled to collect, derived from the amount of a judgment, which compensates the creditor for an injury which occurred before the judgment. The rate applied to calculate prejudgment...