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Complaint
In matters of the law, the term complaint may refer to any one of three things.
A complaint can be the initial plea which sets the litigation in motion. The plaintiff sets forth his/her specific complaint against the defendant and specifies the remedy sought (in the case of a worker or other type of injury case, this refers to the specific amount of damages).
In criminal cases in which the "plaintiff" is the prosecution for the state, a complaint is the document to which a victim or a law enforcement officer swears which outlines the nature and specifics of the crime committed. A criminal complaint is the "charging instrument" - in other words, the means - by which criminal charges are filed against the accused. The filing of a criminal complaint begins the judicial proceedings against the defendant.
"Complaint" is also used interchangeably with the term "petition." In the legal sense, a petition is a written request to a government official or other public authority. Historically, petitions constituted a form of protest against laws or government actions that were seen as unjust. One of the best-known examples of a petition was the Magna Carta Libertatum, or "Great Charter of Freedom." Issued nearly 700 years ago, this petition guaranteed the right of habeas corpus which, up until the passage of the Military Commissions Act in September 2006, protected U.S. citizens and residents from unlawful and arbitrary imprisonment.
Theoretically, the Petition Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees "the right of the people to petition the Government for the redress of grievances" (the Declaration of Independence was actually an example of this). In practice however, this right has been overcome by the practice of corporate lobbying and the legal recognition of money as "free speech" (see McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93 [2003]). Today, petitions in the U.S. are most often used for the purpose of placing political candidates on ballots.