Word.ws English Dictionary

ultima ratio

ultima ratio noun: legal philosophy under which penal redress to crime should only be used as a measure of last resort.

Noun

ultima ratio (uncountable)

  1. legal philosophy under which penal redress to crime should only be used as a measure of last resort
    • Since punishment (including death and prison in the United States) is the harshest type of public measure or burden that the state may take or impose against an individual and the state has the duty to consider the rights and interests of all people involved or affected by a situation (including...2020, Máximo Langer, “Penal Abolitionism and Criminal Law Minimalism: Here and There, Now and Then”, in Harvard Law Review, volume 134, number 42, page 73

Origin of ultima ratio

From Latin [Term?].

Questions about ultima ratio

What does ultima ratio mean?
Ultima ratio means legal philosophy under which penal redress to crime should only be used as a measure of last resort.
What part of speech is ultima ratio?
Ultima ratio is a noun.

Words near ultima ratio in the dictionary

  1. ulteriorness
  2. ulteriour
  3. ultilisation
  4. ultima
  5. Ultima East
  6. ultima ratio
  7. ultima thule
  8. Ultima Thules
  9. ultimacies
  10. ultimacy
  11. Ultimae Thules

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ultima ratio (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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