Pertaining to or connected with courts of law. Thus forensic medicine is medicine in its relation to law. In the Essay, Bk. II. 27, Locke describes ‘person’ as a forensic term, meaning that the point of describing something as a person, or finding that the same person was present on two different occasions, is essentially the attribution of responsibility. Thus if an octogenarian is found to be the same person as the twenty-year-old prison guard of sixty years ago, then he can be held responsible for the crimes of the latter; otherwise not.
Philosophy dictionary. Academic. 2011.