Irrelevant

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Irrelevant

Unrelated or inapplicable to the matter in issue.

Irrelevant evidence has no tendency to prove or disprove any contested fact in a lawsuit.

irrelevant

adj. not important, pertinent, or germane to the matter at hand or to any issue before the court. This is the most common objection raised by attorneys to questions asked or to answers given during testimony in a trial. The objection is made as soon as an alert attorney believes the opposition is going into matters which are not concerned with the facts or outside the issues of the lawsuit. It is often stated in the trio: "Irrelevant, immaterial and incompetent" to cover the bases. The judge must then rule on the relevancy of the question. If the question has been answered before the lawyer could say "objection," the judge may order that answer stricken from the record. Blotting it from a jury's memory or conscience, though, is impossible. (See: immaterial, incompetent, objection, evidence)

References in periodicals archive ?

mainstream, where New Atheists mirror creationists, instead of subtle liberal theologians; for, deeper than the vulgarity of popular religious discourse is the irrelevancy today of theology in elite intellectual settings (pp.

"God Is Dead" and I Don't Feel So Good Myself: Theological Engagements with the New Atheism

The church continues to fuel the fires of homophobia and heterosexism and risks irrelevancy unless leaders like Sojourners can break their silence, step out of complacency, and speak out for change.

Code words

Among Segal's claims and targets: dwindling ballet audiences; a repertoire "that's decaying"; the infantilization of ballet dancers; ballets that traffic in archaic stereotypes; classics that are inauthentic for today's audiences; an art form that values "prettiness" over beauty and depth; and ballet's irrelevancy to today's world.

Beyond ballet bashing: making ballet a more vital art form

Not surprisingly he was denounced as a heretic and today is regarded by some as an irrelevancy in the history of science.

The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

Sherwood debated the cultural merits of the latest photoplays--to today's pallid practitioners, who far too often vie with bloggers for irrelevancy and blurb supremacy.

American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now

Meanwhile the system reduces the less-populous states to a helpless irrelevancy. While professing "every vote equal," the system for choosing presidential electors could result in a member state selecting electors pledged to a presidential candidate who had lost the election in that state.

Assault on the electoral college: a plan to give the presidency to the candidate with the most nationwide votes would make less-populous states irrelevant in presidential elections

Whatever the subject, there is always an SIF lurking in the background with a pointless irrelevancy that nobody could possibly believe but themselves.

ID cards, DNA database - they're not to be SIF-ed at

Those of us who create theatre that needs explaining are doomed to irrelevancy.

Comfort or provocation?

Interweaving stories from his childhood as a herdboy in Transkei; his education; and work as a professor, tax collector, assessor, prosecutor, and magistrate, Ndima offer insights into the relevancy and irrelevancy of principles and procedures of official Roman-Dutch law in the lives and sense of justice of indigenous peoples.

The law of commoners and kings; narratives of a rural Transkei Magistrate

The evolution of that lawsuit--and its ultimate irrelevancy to cleaning up Bowen--provides a cautionary reminder that the old environmental playbook needs a rewrite.

Burning Atlanta: all the old regulatory weapons couldn't reform the Georgia power plant that is America's single biggest polluter. But a new law is working

Ross, 1989, "Information and Volatility--The No-Arbitrage Martingale Approach to Timing and Resolution Irrelevancy", Journal of Finance, 44:1-17