DURESS

Duress

In jurisprudence, duress or coercion refers to a situation whereby a person performs an act as a result of violence, threat or other pressure against the person. Black's Law Dictionary defines duress as "any unlawful threat or coercion used... to induce another to act not act in a manner 1 otherwise would not would". Duress is pressure exerted upon a person to coerce that person to perform an act that he or she ordinarily would not perform. The notion of duress must be distinguished both from undue influence in the civil law and from necessity.

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duress

Noun

  1. Harsh treatment.
  2. Constraint by threat.
  3. The state of compulsion or necessity in which a person is influenced, whether by the unlawful restraint of his liberty or by actual or threatened physical violence, to incur a civil liability or to commit an offence.

Verb

  1. To put under duress; to pressure.
    Someone was duressing her.
    The small nation was duressed into giving up territory.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: duress
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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