Litigious
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence · Benjamin Vaughan Abbott · 1879
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence
1.
In a use peculiar to jurisprudence, litigious means subject to a lawsuit; open to judicial controversy; that which may be claimed and determined in the courts. Thus, in French law, litigious rights are rights which may be brought forward and contested in a suit, either pending or apprehended.
2.
In a vernacular use, litigious is a word of opprobrium applied to persons who are too ready to sue; who are overfond of litigation; will prosecute groundless claims, or unjustly defend wellfounded ones.
3.
In ecclesiastical law, a church is said to be litigious when two rival presentations are offered to the bishop upon tion of suit; the interposing a contesting statement; coming to an issue. The phrase is used in a similar sense in both the canon and the civil law. In the ecclesiastical courts, the general answer of the defendant denying the charges against him formed the contestatio litis; in admiralty practice, also, it is the joining the general issue.
Litis dominium
A civil-law expression for ownership, control, or direction of a suit. By a fiction, the employment of an attorney or proctor in a suit was authorized, and he was supposed to become, by the appointment from his client, the dominus litis. LITISPENDENCIA; LITISPEN- DENCE; LITISPENDENCY. Expressions equivalent, in substance, to the more common lis pendens, q. v.