Court of cassation
a high instance court that exists in some judicial systems
A court of cassation is a high-instance court that exists in some judicial systems. Courts of cassation do not re-examine the facts of a case; they only interpret the relevant law. In this, they are appellate courts of the highest instance. In this way, they differ from systems that have a supreme court that can rule on both the facts of a case and the relevant law. The term derives from the Latin cassare, "to reverse or overturn".
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) answers questions of European Union law following a referral from a court of a member state. In exercising this function it is not a court of cassation: it issues binding advice to the national courts on how EU law ought to be interpreted, it does not overturn decisions of those courts. However, the ECJ can act as a court of cassation when it hears appeals in particular cases from decisions of the General Court of the European Union.
Many common-law supreme courts, like the United States Supreme Court, use a similar system, whereby the court vacates the decision of the lower court and remands the case for retrial in a lower court consistent with the decision of the court hearing the appeal. Where the system differs is that in legal systems such as the American federal courts, mid-tier appeals courts (courts of appeals) generally also remand cases to first-instance courts.
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This entry incorporates text from “Court of cassation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.