Court and procedure

Forty-first on this list is il contraddittorio, and the trap is that English owns the adjective and not the noun. « Contradictory » in English describes two statements that cannot both be true, and outside formal logic the language has no noun in that family at all. The Italian word is a masculine noun and it names something quite different: the requirement that no side be decided against without having been able to answer. Il contraddittorio deve essere garantito is therefore not about inconsistency but about who was in the room. The phrase to watch for is in contraddittorio. A step taken in contraddittorio fra le parti is taken with both of them present and able to reply, and its opposite is written in Latin on the order itself, inaudita altera parte, the other side not heard. That is what makes the second and third entries on this page hang together, because an order obtained without the other side is exactly what an opposizione exists to answer. Outside the courtroom the same noun names a broadcast face-to-face debate, and even there the sense holds: two people, and each one gets to reply.