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Concept
Legal technicality
Summary
The term legal technicality is a casual or colloquial phrase referring to a technical aspect of law. The phrase is not a term of art in the law; it has no exact meaning, nor does it have a legal definition. In public perception, it typically refers to "procedural rules that can dictate the outcome of a case without having anything to do with the merits of that case." However, as a vague term, the definition of a technicality varies from person to person, and it is often simply used to denote any portion of the law that interferes with the outcome desired by the user of the term.
Some legal technicalities govern legal procedure, enable or restrict access to courts, and/or enable or limit the discretion of a court in handing down judgment. These are aspects of procedural law. Other legal technicalities deal with aspects of substantive law, that is, aspects of the law that articulate specific criteria that a court uses to assess a party's compliance with or violation of, for example, one or more criminal laws or civil laws. In some cases, people may regard legal protections such as the exclusionary rule as legal technicalities.
In the introduction to A Dictionary of Human Rights, David Robertson states (emphasis in original): "One cannot dismiss legal technicalities and cut through legal language entirely, because rights basically are legal technicalities. What cannot be expressed with some clarity in a legal document will not be preserved and protected."
In 1928, William W. Brewton wrote that the law is inevitably technical because a relatively small number of laws have to account for a much larger number of possible situations. Since the rules and principles of law are expected to apply to many different cases, they cannot always account for the exact circumstances, which can result in failures of justice in individual cases even when the greatest possible overall justice is being achieved. He said that people mistakenly criticize the technicalities, which are both "necessary and inevitable", when they should focus instead on preventing the original causes of litigation and crime.
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