Court of cassation

A court of cassation is a high court found in some civil law judicial systems that reviews the legal reasoning of lower courts without re-examining the facts of a case, limiting itself to interpreting the law; its name derives from the Latin for to reverse or overturn. This narrows its function compared with a supreme court that may rule on both fact and law, and it also differs from the intermediate appellate courts of civil law countries such as France, which review both facts and law, leaving the court of cassation as the one level in the hierarchy confined purely to questions of law.