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An affirmative defense to a civil lawsuit or criminal charge is a fact or set of facts other than those alleged by the plaintiff or prosecutor which, if proven by the defendant, defeats or mitigates the legal consequences of the defendant's otherwise unlawful conduct.
The defendant is estopped from presenting the related defense, or the plaintiff is estopped from making the related argument against the defendant. Lord Coke stated, "It is called an estoppel or conclusion, because a man's own act or acceptance stoppeth or closeth up his mouth to allege or plead the truth." [7]
The defense of laches is often used as an affirmative defense in patent infringement lawsuits in the USA. In 2021, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit allowed the USPTO to use laches as a reason for denying patents to an applicant, who filed hundreds of applications, that were "atypically long and complex", and who filed amendments ...
The position in most common law jurisdictions (which follow England) is that if an issue is not barred by a finding of 'cause of action estoppel', or 'issue estoppel', the question then turns to whether an abuse of process can be established on the Henderson v Henderson line of authority. [11]
Collateral estoppel (CE), known in modern terminology as issue preclusion, is a common law estoppel doctrine that prevents a person from relitigating an issue. One summary is that, "once a court has decided an issue of fact or law necessary to its judgment, that decision ... preclude[s] relitigation of the issue in a suit on a different cause of action involving a party to the first case". [1]
(In law, this is not a defense as such but an argument that the case should not be heard at all.) Failure to state a cause of action or other insufficiencies of pleading. Any of the affirmative defenses. Defenses conferred by statute – such as a statute of limitations or the statute of frauds.
Estoppel forms part of the rules of equity, which were originally administered in the Chancery courts. Estoppel in English law is a doctrine that may be used in certain situations to prevent a person from relying upon certain rights, or upon a set of facts (e.g. words said or actions performed) which is different from an earlier set of facts.
Clean hands, sometimes called the clean hands doctrine, unclean hands doctrine, or dirty hands doctrine, [1] is an equitable defense in which the defendant argues that the plaintiff is not entitled to obtain an equitable remedy because the plaintiff is acting unethically or has acted in bad faith with respect to the subject of the complaint—that is, with "unclean hands".