Criminology

The sixteenth entry is la légitimité, and the adjective underneath it sits, in French, inside a fixed phrase that no dictionary line prepares you for. On its own légitime matches « legitimate » closely enough — un gouvernement légitime, une demande légitime — but anybody reading about crime meets it first in la légitime défense, and that is simply self-defence. It is the wording of the criminal code, it is the plea entered after a fight, and it is ordinary speech too: il a agi en état de légitime défense says the man was defending himself. English has no « legitimate defence »; put those two words side by side and they say nothing together, because the work is done by « self- ». A second use of the same adjective sits in the law of succession, where la légitime stands alone as a noun and names the share of an estate that cannot be kept from the children — « the forced share » in English, never a legitimacy. Read la légitime défense as an argument about what was fair and you have missed that an article of the code is being named.