Definition
"Is N" is not a recognized standalone legal term. The source material provided is a fragment of a dictionary entry — specifically, the tail end of an entry for IRRELEVANCY (or a closely related form of that word), truncated mid-word as "levancy." The visible text defines irrelevancy in an answer as consisting of statements not material to the decision of the case — that is, statements that do not form or tender any material issue.
The complete term this fragment belongs to is almost certainly IRRELEVANCY or IRRELEVANT MATTER, defined in pleading as allegations or statements in an answer (or other pleading) that bear no material relation to the matters in dispute and do not raise or respond to any material issue.
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Common Confusion
Do not treat this fragment as a defined term. Researchers who encounter it in corpus searches should redirect to IRRELEVANCY, IMMATERIALITY, or SURPLUSAGE. The confusion here is entirely a product of source corruption, not semantic overlap between genuine legal concepts.
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Why It Matters in Research
This entry illustrates a common hazard in digitized historical legal dictionaries: optical character recognition (OCR) errors and page-break truncations can render fragments as apparent headwords. Researchers encountering "Is N" in a Law Mind corpus search are likely seeing a corrupted or incomplete record, not a discrete legal concept.
If your research led you here through a keyword search, the intended target is almost certainly IRRELEVANCY, IMMATERIALITY, or SURPLUSAGE — related but distinct concepts in pleading law. The cases cited in the fragment (People v. McCumber, 18 N.Y. 321; Walker v. Hewitt, 11 How. Prac. (N.Y.) 398; Carpenter v. Bell, 1 Rob. (N.Y.) 715; Smith v. Smith, 50 S.C. 54) all concern pleading standards and the distinction between material and immaterial allegations — a research thread that belongs under those headwords.
Historical pleading sources require particular care. Under common law code pleading regimes — the context in which these New York and South Carolina cases arose — the consequences of irrelevant matter in a pleading were procedurally significant: a party could move to strike irrelevant allegations, and courts drew careful distinctions between matter that was merely redundant (surplusage) and matter that was affirmatively irrelevant (tendering no issue). Those distinctions do not map cleanly onto modern notice pleading under the Federal Rules or most contemporary state rules.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.), Supplemental volume, contains this fragment under what appears to be a headword beginning with "Is N" — a digitization artifact. The substantive content matches the classical definition of irrelevancy in pleading: allegations are irrelevant when they are not material to the decision of the case and do not form or tender a material issue. This formulation is consistent with the definition of irrelevancy found in the main body of Black's 2nd Edition and with contemporaneous treatises on code pleading. The cited cases are real and belong to the 19th-century New York and South Carolina pleading traditions. No independent legal concept called "Is N" exists in the Anglo-American legal tradition.
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