Milum:
I am certain that very few Latin phrases are being taught in law school now, but you will find that there are literally tens of thousands of Latin phrases in an older edition of a good law dictionary. When the question came up I was sure in my mind that there is such a phrase; finding it is something else.
Essentially these are catchphrases for important points of law that have been well settled or are names of particular writs that were at one time important in law. An example of the former is the point in law that prior court decisions are to be given great deference in applying law to a current case. Rather than saying all that, an attorney needed to merely say "the doctrine of stare decisis (STAR-aye duh-See-sis), which means literally to let the decision stand.
A few things like that are still in use, like writ of habeus corpus and a plea of nolo contendere, but the rest are pretty much as dead as Latin. Still standing though are most of the legal principles behind them.
TEd
