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Statutes are laws made by legislative bodies; they are distinguished from case law or precedent, which is decided by courts, regulations issued by government agencies, and oral or customary law. [1] [2] [better source needed] Statutes may originate with the legislative body of a country, state or province, county, or municipality.
First page of the 1804 original edition of the Napoleonic Code. A code of law, also called a law code or legal code, is a systematic collection of statutes.It is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the code was enacted, by a process of codification. [1]
By contrast, a non-positive law title is a title that has not been codified into federal law, and is instead merely an editorial compilation of individually enacted federal statutes. [15] By law, those titles of the United States Code that have not been enacted into positive law are "prima facie evidence" [16] of the law in effect.
But some statutes omit a definitions section entirely, or (more commonly) fail to define a particular term. The plain meaning rule attempts to guide courts faced with litigation that turns on the meaning of a term not defined by the statute, or on that of a word found within a definition itself.
A statute is to be interpreted so as to uphold international treaties to which the UK is a party. In the case of EU law, any statutory provision which contravenes the principle embodied in the EU treaties that EU law is supreme is effectively void: Factortame. [5]
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, [1] with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate.
For example, P. L. 111–5 (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) was the fifth enacted public law of the 111th United States Congress. Public laws are also often abbreviated as Pub. L. No. X–Y. When the legislation of those two kinds are proposed, it is called public bill and private bill respectively.
Common law legal systems can include a statute specifying the length of time within which a claimant or prosecutor must file a case. In some jurisdictions (e.g., California), [2] a case cannot begin after the period specified, and courts have no jurisdiction over cases filed after the statute of limitations has expired.