the.com/habeas corpus

means A court order that forces jailers to bring a detained person before a judge so the legality of their imprisonment can be tested — you can't just hold someone and refuse to explain why.

from Straight from Latin, where it means literally 'you should have the body' — habeas (you should have) corpus (the body). It began as the opening words of the actual writ, the formal command a court issued to whoever was holding a prisoner: produce the body, in person, before the judge. Over centuries in English common law it hardened into the broader principle it's known for now — that detention without justification shown in court is unlawful. The phrase stuck around in its original Latin rather than being translated, the way many old legal formulas survive as fossils of the documents they once opened.