Re: Nunc pro tunc

["'A. Joseph Ross'" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

On Mon, 7 Jul 1997, Dan Strassberg wrote:

> Back in March, when the FCC dismissed WKOX's application for 50 kW-U, I was
> puzzled by a note in the FCC database. The note said that the application
> had been dismissed NPT. I made several inquiries about the meaning of NPT,
> but nobody that I asked knew. I just remembered a (Latin, I assume) term
> that appears in many of the summaries of FCC actions. The term is nunc pro
> tunc. I wonder if nunc and tunc aren't, themselves, abbreviations of longer
> Latin words. Counselor, can you explain, in layman's terms, what nunc pro
> tunc means? Conceivably, if we knew, we might have a clue about why the FCC
> dismissed the application.
 
"Nunc pro tunc" means "now for then."  The expression is used when an
order is to have some retroactive effect.  It usually means that the court
is correcting some mistake by allowing an act done now to be retroactive
to some prior time.  In the case of a dismissal nunc pro tunc of an
application before the FCC, I can only guess that the dismissal is being
done later than it should have been, or perhaps that an application filed
in error is being dismissed as of the filing date, for some reason.

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  A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                                          617.367.0468
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