1. Civil law. The principle that a decision-maker may decline to decide a dispute on the ground that the matter is unclear. • Even British judges formerly sometimes said Non liquet and found for the defendant.
2. Int’l law. A tribunal’s nondecision resulting from the unclarity of the law applicable to the dispute at hand. • In modern usage, the phrase appears almost always in passages stating what a court must not do: tribunals are routinely disallowed from declaring a non liquet. — Abbr. n.l.
