Operative Fact Doctrine, a rule of equity

As a complement of legal jurisdiction, equity "seeks to reach and complete justice where the courts of law, through the inflexibility of their rules and want of power to adapt their judgments to the special circumstances of cases, are competent to do so." Equity regards the spirit and and not the letter, the intent and not the form, the substance rather than the circumstance, as it variously expressed by different courts. Remarkably, it is applied only in the absence of statutory law and never in contravention of said law.