the.com/restraining order
A piece of paper betting that paper can stop a person paper never could.
means A court order legally requiring someone to stay away from, and stop contacting, a specific person.
from The phrase is modern legal plain-English rather than Latin-rooted jargon — 'restrain' comes via Old French 'restreindre' from Latin 'restringere,' meaning to bind back or hold tight, and 'order' is simply the court's command. The term crystallized in 20th-century family and civil law as courts needed a plain name for an injunction specifically meant to keep one person physically away from another.
- legal paradox
- enforced by the same system that ignored early warning signs
- violation rate
- roughly half are violated at least once
- not a wall
- it is documentation, not a bodyguard
- origin
- civil remedy dating back centuries before modern stalking laws