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Legal Dictionary of Pakistan

Quick lookup for English, Urdu, and Latin legal terms used in Pakistani jurisprudence.

Duke

1. A sovereign prince; a ruler of a duchy. 2. The first order of nobility in Great Britain below the royal family. "But after the Norman conquest, which changed the military policy of the nation, the kings themselves continuing for many generations dukes of Normandy, they would not honour any subjects with that title, till the time of Edward III; who, claiming to be the king of France, and thereby losing the ducal in the royal dignity, in the eleventh year of his reign created his son, Edward the black prince, duke of Cornwall: and many, of the royal family especially, were afterwards raised to the honour. However, in the reign of queen Elizabeth, A.D. 1572, the whole order became utterly extinct: but it was revived about fifty years afterwards by her successor, who was remarkably prodigal of honours, in the person of George Villiers duke of Buckingham." 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 385 (1765).

Duke of Exeter's Daughter

A torture rack in the tower of London, named after the Duke of Exeter, Henry VI's minister who assisted in introducing it to England. - Also termed brake. "The rack . . . to extort a confession from criminals, is a practice of a different nature . . . . And the trial by rack is utterly unknown to the law of England; though once when the dukes of Exeter and Suffolk ... had laid a design to introduce the civil law into this kingdom as the rule of government, for a beginning thereof they erected a rack for torture; which was called in derision the duke of Exeter's daughter, and still remains in the tower of London: where it was occasionally used as an engine of state, not of law, more than once in the reign of queen Elizabeth." 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 320-21 (1769).

Duke of York's Laws

A body of laws compiled in 1665 by Governor Nicholls for the more orderly government of the New York colony. The laws were gradually extended to the entire province.