(law) A common law rule according to which police officers, firefighters, and other professional rescuers cannot collect on damages that occur in the course of their duties even in cases of clear negligence by other parties.

(law) A common law rule that establishes three age brackets for determining a juvenile's culpability for a tort or a crime.

(US, law) A common law rule according to which a baseball team cannot be held liable for injuries suffered by a spectator struck by a foul ball so long as the team has offered some protected seating.

(law) A common law rule according to which an ambiguous criminal law should be interpreted in the way most favorable to the defendant.

(law) Synonym of fireman's rule

A formula used to estimate underlying probabilities when there are few observations, or for events that have not been observed to occur at all in (finite) sample data.

(Canada, crime, law, politics, constitution, human rights) A rule about how long criminal court cases can take, and when exceeding the determined limit, is considered excessive and violating constitutional rights, and thus the criminal proceedings are summarily terminated with no recourse, and the defendant released. The limit of 18 or 30 months from placing criminal charges to trial is established in the rule.

(rare) A flexible leaden mason's rule that can be bent around the curves of a molding, and thus used to measure or reproduce irregular curves.

plural of Lesbian rule

(geometry) Pythagorean theorem