Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) My Lai incident mē lī [key], a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War. On Mar. 16, 1968, a unit of the U.S. army's Americal division, led by Lt. William L. Calley, inva...

(Encyclopedia) Lee, Charles, 1731–82, American Revolutionary army officer, b. Cheshire, England. He first came to America to serve in the French and Indian War and took part in General Braddock's disastrous campai...

(Encyclopedia) Germain, George Sackville, 1st Viscount Sackville jûrˈmən, –mān [key], 1716–85, British soldier and statesman. He was known as Lord George Sackville until 1770, when under the terms of a will ...

(Encyclopedia) Posse Comitatus Act, 1878, U.S. federal law that makes it a crime to use the military as a domestic police force in the United States under most circumstances. The law was designed to end the use of f...

(Encyclopedia) ring, in mathematics, system consisting of a set R of elements and two binary operations, such that addition makes R a commutative group and multiplication is associative and distributes over addition...

(Encyclopedia) McBain, Howard Lee, 1880–1936, American political scientist, b. Toronto, Ont., grad. Richmond (Va.) College, 1900, Ph.D. Columbia, 1907. After teaching at George Washington and Wisconsin universitie...

(Encyclopedia) Ames, James Barr, 1846–1910, American jurist, b. Boston, grad. Harvard Law School, 1873. At Harvard he became associate professor (1873), professor (1877), and dean (1895). A disciple of C. C. Langd...

(Encyclopedia) Traynor, Roger John, 1900–1983, American jurist, b. Park City, Utah, grad. Univ. of California at Berkeley (A.B., 1923, Ph.D., 1926, J.D., 1927.) After teaching political science and law at the Univ...

(Encyclopedia) bar, the, originally, the rail that enclosed the judge in a court; hence, a court or a system of courts. The persons qualified and authorized to conduct the trial of cases are also known collectively ...

(Encyclopedia) court system in the United States, judicial branches of the federal and state governments charged with the application and interpretation of the law. The U.S. court system is divided into two administ...