Abandonment
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- "Abandon" redirects here. For , see .
The term abandonment has a multitude of uses which can generally be broken into legal and extra-legal uses. This "signpost article" provides a guide to the various uses of the word via links to articles that deal with each of the distinct concepts at length.
Uses in law
Abandonment in law, the relinquishment of an interest, claim, privilege or possession. This broad meaning has a number of applications in different branches of law.
- In common law jurisdictions, both common law abandonment and statutory abandonment of property may be recognized. A common law abandonment may be generally defined as "the relinquishment of a right [in property] by the owner thereof without any regard to future possession by himself or any other person, and with the intention to foresake or desert the right...." 1 Corpus Juris Secundum “Abandonment” § 2 (1985) (emphasis added) [footnotes and citations omitted]. Common law abandonment is "the voluntary relinquishment of a thing by its owner with the intention of terminating his ownership, and without [the intention of] vesting ownership in any other person; the giving up of a thing absolutely, without reference to any particular person or purpose...." Id. (emphasis added) [footnotes and citations omitted]. An example of statutory abandonment in a common law jurisdiction is abandonment by a bankruptcy trustee under #redirect ).
- Abandonment of an action (see Judicature Acts), relates to a plaintiff's discontinuance of proceedings ongoing before the High Court of Justice of England and Wales and which procedure changed substantially as a result of reforms to the judiciary of the United Kingdom in 1875.
- In marine insurance parlance, abandonment involves the surrender of a ship or goods to the insurer.
- In the domain of copyrights, abandonment is recognized as the explicit release of material by a copyright holder into the public domain. However, statutory abandonment is a relatively unclear area of copyright law and the more common approach is to license work under a scheme that provides for public use rather than strictly abandoning copyright. For more information consult "disclaimer of interest".
- In the military practice and law, abandonment of a military post by a soldier can be called desertion, and the condition of being away from that post can be called being .
- In family circumstances, child abandonment is often recognized as a crime, in which case the child is usually not physically harmed directly as part of the abandonment; distinct from this is the widely recognized crime of infanticide.
- Abandonment of domicile is the ceasing to reside permanently in a former domicile coupled with the intention of choosing a new domicile. The presumptions which will guide the court in deciding whether a former domicile has been abandoned or not must be inferred from the facts of each individual case. In the United States, a tenant is generally understood to have abandoned a property if he or she has fallen behind in rent and shown a lack of interest in continuing to live there. The landlord must then send notice of the intent to sell the property and wait a certain number of days to take action on it. How long the landlord has to wait depends on the value of the property; the landlord can keep the money up to the costs incurred as a result of the abandonment; the rest must be set aside for the former tenant, should she or he eventually return.
- Abandonment of an easement is the relinquishment of some accommodation or right in another's land, such as right of way, free access of light and air, etc. See easement.
- Abandonment of railways has a legal signification in England recognized by statute, by authority of which the Board of Trade may, under certain circumstances, grant a warrant to a railway authorizing the abandonment of its line or part of it.
- Abandonment of trademark is understood to happen when a trademark is not used for three or more years, or when it is deliberately discontinued; trademark law protects only trademarks being actively used and defended. An example of an abandoned trademark is aspirin, once a mark of the Bayer company, now considered a generic term.
Extra-legal uses
Outside of legal circles, abandonment has additional meanings and uses:- Abandonment is a play about love, death, identity and evolution. It is a complex mixture of social comedy and family drama, reminding us that the past is not as far away as we think. Written by Kate Atkinson.
- Child abandonment in film and literature:
- * Bachelor Mother (Garson Kanin; US, 1939)
- Abandonment of a patient, in medicine, is where a health care professional (usually a physician, nurse, dentist, or paramedic) has already begun emergency treatment of a patient and then suddenly walks away while the patient is still in need, without securing the services of an adequate substitute, or giving the patient adequate opportunity to find one. It is a crime in many countries and can result in the loss of one's license to practice. Also, because of the public policy in favor of keeping people alive, the professional cannot defend himself or herself by pointing to the patient's inability to pay for services, the possibility of exposure to malpractice liability beyond one's insurance coverage, or the patient's inability to stop screaming (because of extreme pain).
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