Are traffic tickets equity law?
<p>Was curious about courts of equity and the placement it has because i thought they did away with it according to some case involving a woman and how she beat her ticket with that defense.</p>

<p>Traffic tickets are not equity law.</p>
<p>This said, equity has not been done away with. It has <strong>merged</strong> with law in almost all states, and in some states, equitable defenses are available to legal claims (although in others equitable defenses are only available to equitable claims).</p>

<p>The courts of Equity go back to roughly 1500 in the English system, and were inherited by the US from their colonial legal system. Charles Rembar, at the start of the chapter &quot;Equity&quot; in <em>The Law of the Land</em> wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By 1300, as we have seen, the three great courts of common law are well established. They remain, however, fingers of the royal fist. The Justices act as king’s delegates. “In the name of the king” is not at first formality. Hence petitions to remedy a wrong can bypass the Justices and be addressed directly to the throne. There they will go to the Chancellor, the premier royal aide. ...</p>
<p>The Chancellor and his assistants form a secretariat; it is called the Chancery. They issue the writs that start the actions in the courts of law, and it is to be expected that other legal matters will be referred to them.</p>
<p>If you want some royal justice, these are the people you have to see.</p>
<p>Etymology, often misleading because of the way we move our words around, here helps give the picture. The Latin <em>cancellus</em> meant grating, and hence <em>cancellarius</em>, “doorkeeper.” “Chancellor” is medieval English-French for <em>cancellarius</em>. Another branch of royal administration is the Exchequer, the king’s treasury, his checkerboard tax-collecting and disbursing office, which itself gives rise to a court of law. Chancery does the reading and writing, Exchequer does the arithmetic.</p>
<p>The petitions for something other than a regular writ, in the main, are of two sorts. In the one, petitioner asks the king to rule against himself. This is not as strange as it appears. The king has acted through his men, who may be overzealous, and the king will not lose face if he disclaims their depredations. Besides, petitioner in such cases is likely to be someone high in the social order. Typically, the royal officers have claimed escheat. They say that a vassal who held certain land directly of the king has died without heirs; hence the land must revert to the king as feudal overlord. Then petitioner appears and says it is not so: I myself am heir, a living heir. But Common Pleas, King’s Bench, Exchequer—none of them can help me. Their writs do not run against the king.</p>
<p>The second tapping of the reservoir of royal justice involves disputes not with the king, but between one subject and another. According to petitioner, the regular writs do not meet his crying need. The procedure is different from that of the established courts. The petition is a direct descendant of the old <em>querela</em>. It is called a “bill,” like a petition addressed to Parliament. (The same word is, of course, still used for a legislative proposal.) ...</p>
<p>For the first hundred years of the common-law system, the Chancellor and his clerks have great freedom to design new writs or alter old ones. In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, this freedom encounters barriers. In part, they are set up by an adolescent Parliament, which, when barons hold the upper hand, resists extensions of the royal power. In part, they represent a changing attitude on the part of the royal Justices. The courts of common law seem less eager to expand their jurisdiction. If the variant writ the clerks have issued seems too far out of line, the Justices will reject it. Perhaps the Justices feel overworked; business has got too good. Perhaps it is the gravity of precedent, a settling into familiar grooves. In any event, the easy entertainment of new writs slows down.</p>
<p>But the Chancellor, acting for the king, can if he chooses exert the underlying power. As time goes on, he chooses more and more. He may be genuinely concerned about petitioner’s plight. Or he may wish to enlarge this wing of his office. Very likely both. Though arising from an institutional institutional defect rather than a particular abuse, the petition here, like all <em>querelae</em>, is a highly personal entreaty. The bill is “couched in piteous terms.” The king is begged to lend his aid, “for the love of God and in the way of charity.” Until midway in the sixteenth century, the Chancellors are ecclesiastics; hence the church courts are the model. The Chancellor orders the person of whom complaint is made to appear before him, under pain—<em>sub poena</em>—of some punishment if he fails. The order is different from the common-law original writ, which states the gist of plaintiff’s grievance. Defendant is merely told to show up, to answer the complaint. “Answer” means just that. Under oath, and sentence by sentence, defendant must stand and respond to each allegation of the bill.</p>
<p>It is an adversary procedure, like that in the courts of common law. But the Chancellor is a more active figure than the Justices of those courts. The Justice is essentially an umpire, though a princely one. He lets the parties draw the issues and the jury find the facts. He is bound by existing law (in theory always, and usually in practice). The Chancellor, in contrast, asks questions of the parties and finds the facts himself; there is no jury. He is not bound by fixed rules. The Chancellor will decide both what has happened and what to do about it. His disposition of the case follows conscience and good faith (in theory always, and like enough in practice).</p>
<p>If he decides in favor of petitioner, he will issue a “decree.” It will forbid the defendant to do something he has been doing or is threatening to do. That is, the Chancellor will enjoin him. As the characteristic remedies of the courts of common law are the judgment awarding <em>seisin</em> of land and the judgment for damages, the characteristic remedy of Chancery is injunction.<sup>[1]</sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Starting in 1848m with New York's &quot;Field Code&quot;,most US states merged the Equity and common-law court systems.<sup>[2]</sup> (Delaware still has a separate court of Equity.)</p>
<p>Such remnants of the courts of Equity as still exist  would not normally be involved in a traffic case. Some of the principles and procedures of the courts of Equity have been absorbed into the general legal system in the US (and by different means, in the UK). Equity was not abolished, but it does not remain as a <strong>separate</strong> system of law in most US states. That merger would not, as far as I can see, provide any defense to any traffic case.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p>[1]: Rembar, Charles. The Law of the Land: The Evolution of Our Legal System (pp. 291-294). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.</p>
<p>[2]: Rembar, Charles. The Law of the Land: The Evolution of Our Legal System (p. 252). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.</p>

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