legal error
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 502 U.S. 46 - Griffin v. United States · 1991Most cited · 2,358 citing opinions
a mistake about the law, as opposed to a mistake concerning the weight or the factual import of the evidence.
How often courts cite the case defining “legal error”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “legal error” — 2,358 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.