Not too many people are familiar with law terms, but there are only dictionaries for everyone who is interested in learning the proper use of legal terminology. If you are a law student, becoming familiar with law terms is always a wise policy. But these are probably not the only people who are interested in the proper use of law terms. There are, in fact, any number of people who are interested in the proper use of legal terms.
Some of these might be a little bit surprising, but they probably make sense upon further investigation. Someone is probably as likely to visit Wikipedia to look up the word “litigation” if he or she is reading a John Grisham novel as they are if they are looking for the solution for a term paper. This is because many online dictionaries and encyclopedias can provide a good introduction to law terminology, but they are not the end of a process. Rather, they are the beginning of it.
It is for this reason that law terms are everywhere, but in depth analysis of what these law terms actually mean can often only be found in the analogues of the courts. The Supreme Court, for instance, expounds greatly upon the applicability of certain law terms, a process known as precedent which allows certain terms to take on different levels of significance over time.
These precedents for law terms also allow lawyers who come afterward to express the applicability of law terms to various situations. It is for this reason that many people will look to the filings or summaries of Supreme Court cases to determine how legal terms ought to apply to specific matters at hand.
These law terms can be looked up in databases and on other websites. A process which makes the study of the law much easier. And it is for this reason that filing law terms is so important. The court decisions of the past echo in the present.