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Officer of the court

 
Law Encyclopedia: Officers of the Court
This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

An all-inclusive term for any type of court employee including judges, clerks, sheriffs, marshals, bailiffs, and constables.

An attorney is also regarded as being an officer of the court and must therefore comply with court rules.

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Wikipedia: Officer of the court
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The generic term officer of the court applies to all those who, in some degree in function of their professional or similar qualifications, have a legal part—and hence legal and deontological obligations—in the complex functioning of the judicial system as a whole, in order to forge justice out of the application of the law and the simultaneous pursuit of the legitimate interests of all parties and the general good of society.

They can be divided into the following functional groups; in most case various synonyms and parallels exist as well as a plethora of operational variations, depending on the jurisdiction and the changes in relevant legislation:

Contents

Court proper

Foremost those who make the decisions that determine the course of justice and its outcome:

Investigation and expertise

These are, like the accidental witness, though not in chief of accidental access to relevant information but through their skills, experience and equipment, used to provide information to the actual decision makers above

Services to the parties

  • Attorneys[1]
  • Bail bondsmen, who may however undertake action to capture an absconding client
  • Interpreters/translators are not generally considered officers of the court, although they do render their services to the parties in the interests of the court proceedings. However, there are exceptions where interpreters may be employed on a permanent basis by courts to act as interpreters when called upon, e.g. International Court of Justice and the European Court of Justice. In some jurisdictions court interpreters may also be deemed as officers of the court pro tempore. Court interpreters and translators have an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth and avoid evasion.
  • Court Appointed Special Advocates in some jurisdictions are considered officers of the court.
  • Process servers carry out service of process. In some jurisdictions they are appointed by a court and are considered appointed officers of the court.

Sources and References

  1. ^ The Supreme Court of the United States held in in Ex parte Garland, 71 U. S. 333 (1866) that "Attorneys and counselors are not officers of the United States; they are officers of the court, admitted as such by its order upon evidence of their possessing sufficient legal learning and fair private character." However, Cammer v. United States, 350 U.S. 399 (1956) held that, for the purposes of 18 U.S.C. § 401(2), lawyers are not court "officers" in the same category as marshals, bailiffs, court clerks or judges.

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Law Encyclopedia. West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Copyright © 1998 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Officer of the court" Read more