Legal Maxims –

Latin maxims articulate the principled foundations on which the law is built. Each is a time-tested, ancient treasure of Roman law which not only embellish as much the common law as the civil law, but rightfully shape, mold and intellectually structure and ground lawyers, from their first day of law school to the last law journal they read in retirement..

A maxim a day…….

cummunis error facit jus

Literal meaning :  Common error makes right.

# The maxim has been explained thus by Duhaime's Law Dictionary-

“The maxim that assists in resolving situations where many persons have innocently committed an error and were the errors to be strictly applied, would suffer unfairly. For example, where a process error runs rampant in the registration of land titles for several years and is then discovered with the potential effect of vacating titles of thousands of conveyances, a judge might invoke communis error facit jus to resolve the legal crisis and unfairness of such a legal mess to innocent land owners.”

(Source : http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/C/CommunisErrorFacitJus.aspx)

# Applying the maxim, in income tax proceedings, Sri N.D. Raghavan, Vice-President ( as he was then ) speaking for the bench in Durairaj Mills Ltd. vs DCIT [72 TTJ 799 (Mad.)] spoke thus-

The principle underlying the doctrine of stare decisis is that it is often more important that the law should be certain rather than that it should be ideally perfect, because whenever a decision is departed from, the certainty of the law is sacrificed. According to this doctrine, justice requires that the decision though found in error should stand inviolate nonetheless. This is aptly expressed by the Latin maxim ‘communis error facit jus’  , i.e., common error sometimes makes law-vide Salmond ‘Jurisprudence’ p. 217 (11th Edn.) The only thing is that the error should not be of such a magnitude as to offend the sense of justice and that the considerations of certainty in law outweigh those of legal accuracy.