Parlement, the name given to the local courts of justice in France prior to the Revolution, in which the edicts of the king required to be registered before they became laws; given by pre-eminence to the one in Paris, composed of lawyers, or gentlemen of the long robe, as they were called, whose action the rest uniformly endorsed, and which played an important part on the eve of the Revolution, and contributed to further the outbreak of it, to its own dissolution in the end.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Parkman, Francis * Parliament