How do you determine an issue of a legal case?

Generally, issues arise because someone, a private party, a corporation, or the people of a state, believe they have been harmed. In civil law that harm can be a "tort" that does not arise to criminal behavior or a simple disagreement over what the terms of a contract or other legal document mean. The behavior can be a crime where the "legal" victim is the people of the state in which the crime occurred.

When a person feels wronged or "injured" by another entity, the first question would likely be, is there a law that prohibits the entity from doing the harm that has been done to the person harmed or injured? if there is a law that prohibits the alleged behavior, then the FACTS surrounding the behavior will be analyzed with the law that prohibits the behavior.


Often, parties don't agree on the facts or don't agree that the facts apply to the law that is alleged to have been broken or the harm alleged to have been done. Parties often disagree on what the facts mean when applied to the law or what the law means when applied to a certain set of facts; this situation is considered to be "at issue."