claim

[Date: 1300-1400; Language: Old French; Origin: clamer, from Latin clamare 'to cry out, shout']

The legal document which carries a claim is often called a 'statement of claim' in English law, or a 'complaint' in U.S. federal practice and in many U.S. states. It can be any communication notifying the party to whom it is addressed of an alleged fault which resulted in damages, often expressed in amount of money the receiving party should pay/reimburse. A cause of action [案由; 诉讼事由] generally encompasses both the legal theory (the legal wrong the plaintiff claims to have suffered) and the remedy (the relief a court is asked to grant).

In the colonial times of the United States American men could claim a piece of land for themselves and the claim has different level of merit according to the de facto [实际上存在的] conditions:

• claim without any action on the ground
• claim with (movable) property of the claimant on the ground
• claim with the claimant visiting the land
• claim with claimant living on the land.

De jure is used to indicate that something legally exists or is a particular thing.

A mining claim is the claim of the right to extract minerals from a tract of public land. In the United States, the practice began with the California gold rush [淘金热] of 1849. In the absence of effective government, the miners in each new mining camp made up their own rules, and chose to essentially adopt Mexican mining law then in effect in California. The Mexican law gave the right to mine to the first one to discover the mineral deposit [矿床] and begin mining it. The area that could be claimed by one person was limited to that which could be mined by a single individual or a small group.

六级/考研单词: illicit, seldom, notify, allege, plaintiff, unite, merit, accord, extract, tract, deposit