JURISDICTION • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Jurisdiction

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/dʒˌʊrəsdˈɪkʃən/ /dʒˌʊrɪsdˈɪkʃən/ Listen

noun

Jurisdiction n.

(Law) The legal power, right, or authority of a particular court to hear and determine causes, to try criminals, or to execute justice; judicial authority over a cause or class of causes; as, certain suits or actions, or the cognizance of certain crimes, are within the jurisdiction of a particular court, that is, within the limits of its authority or commission.

The authority of a sovereign power to govern or legislate; the right of making or enforcing laws; the power or right of exercising authority. "To live exempt From Heaven's high jurisdiction." "You wrought to be a legate; by which power You maim'd the jurisdiction of all bishops."

Sphere of authority; the limits within which any particular power may be exercised, or within which a government or a court has authority. Note: Jurisdiction, in its most general sense, is the power to make, declare, or apply the law. When confined to the judiciary department, it is what we denominate the judicial power, the right of administering justice through the laws, by the means which the laws have provided for that purpose. Jurisdiction is limited to place or territory, to persons, or to particular subjects.

See images of 'Jurisdiction'

Etymology of 'Jurisdiction'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Jurisdiction" Quotes from Famous Books

... elements into the controversy in assailing as unlawful the jurisdiction of British prize courts over neutral vessels seized or detained. Briefly, Great Britain arbitrarily extended her domestic law, through the promulgation of Orders in Council, to the high seas, which the American Government ...

— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the ...

— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... French civil law system and customary law; judicial review in the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court; has not accepted compulsory ICJ jurisdiction ...

— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... just treatment, and discourses on the upright character of his race, there were no speeches more significant nor more prophetic than his arraignment of the apathetic manner with which Congress had greeted his bill, designed "to give to the federal government entire jurisdiction over all cases of lynching and death by mob violence." If, he declared, the nation is to avoid the state of anarchy and moral decay to which conditions were then rapidly leading, there remained no alternative, save the enactment, by some future ...

— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... telegraphic advices which we publish to-day in reference to the arrest and imprisonment at Havana of Bidwell, one of the parties accused of the recent forgeries on the Bank of England, are very interesting, touching the jurisdiction of the Island authorities in this matter. It appears that Bidwell was arrested at the request of the British Government on the supposition that he was a British subject; but it is represented that he is a citizen of the United States of America, and that ...

— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

More quotes...