Glossary of legal terms

A ruling that determines the substantive claim, be it wholly or partly.

Person or the public body that is sued or has been brought before the Court.

Procedure whereby, generally as a result of a court order, the parties are required to disclose all relevant and necessary documents in their possession relevant to the issues in the trial.

Margin of choice conferred by the legal norm to the public administration to act or not act in a given case, and to choose between different consequences, all legal, the most reasonable to best achieve the purpose provided by the law, balancing public interest with other interests involved.

Duty of Public Administration to take into consideration all the relevant facts by gathering information and evaluating and weighing up the evidence.

Duty of Public Administration in its areas of competence to provide assistance and advice and to respond to questions and enquiries of citizens and companies.

Electronic procedure that enables a party to file a claim by exclusively electronic means.

Enables the parties and/or their representatives in cases brought before the court to exchange procedural documents with the registries by exclusively electronic means.

Any document in electronic format containing structured data (and possibly also unstructured data) used in the context of an administrative process.

Administration: data files in a format created by software commonly available to the general public such as Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Excel or Word, and consumer accounting programs.

Judiciary: any text, illustration or other matter supplied or produced by either Party in digitised form on disc, memory stick, via email, online.

Electronic file management is a document management software solution that allows a party or a court or a judicial officer to capture, store, and manage physical and electronic files. An electronic file management system is specifically designed to replace physical file cabinets and also includes features like search, mobile document access, document distribution, and editing documents.

Electronic indication of a person’s intent to agree to the content of a document or a set of data to which the signature relates.

Execution of judgments.

Illegality of administrative acts that affected the administrative discretionary measure when the administration grossly and manifestly misunderstood the evaluation of the facts that motivated its decision. This may happen when an element of the legal norm, granting the administrative power, contains an “indefinite legal concept” to be fulfilled by the authority with content and the administration acts taking into account a misrepresentation of the facts.

In common law, the leading or adducing of oral evidence from a witness presented by a party as his/her own witness.

In civil law, examination in chief is when a witness is asked by the party that has called them. After giving examination in chief, the witnesses are cross- examined by the other party.