Meaning of &quot;apart from this section&quot; Reading Crown Proceedings Act 1950 I came across a use of the phrase "apart from this section" which I can't make much sense of: 14 Method of making Crown a party to proceedings (1) Subject to the provisions of this Act and any other Act, civil proceedings under this Act by the Crown may be instituted by— (a) the appropriate government department in its own name if the department has power to sue apart from this section; (2) Subject to the provisions of this Act and any other Act, civil proceedings under this Act against the Crown shall be instituted against— (a) the appropriate government department in its own name if the department may be sued apart from this section; What is the purpose/meaning of the bold phrase in there? Would the provisions have a different meaning if that phrase was omitted? So far my interpretation is that the cited provisions only apply if any piece of legislation other than this section provides that the government department can sue/be sued. That said, the government department would not be able to sue/be sued just by virtue of section 14 unless other statute allowed so. But the thing is: section 14 on its own does not grant any government department the ability to sue/be sued. Therefore such ability can only be granted by another piece of legislation. Why would then "apart from this section" be necessary there?
I take that to mean that section 14 alone should not be construed to give a department the power to sue under sub section (1), nor the ability to be sued under sub section (2). Rather, if some other law, or some other section of that law confers such a power or ability, section 14 indicates how the power should be used, that is, gives the proper procedure. But if no such other law is in effect, section 14 alone won't do. If the law has simply said: civil proceedings under this Act by the Crown may be instituted by (a) the appropriate government department in its own That might have been construed to grant such powers to every "appropriate " department, which apparently was not desired.
The clause refers to what might be a lawsuit, which can be adjudicated in appropriate government courts (cf. the choice of law clause), but instead would be submitted to an arbitrator. The contract will spell out the details. An offence is a punishable criminal act, which is outside the scope of civil suits. In US law, the government prosecutes the wrong-doer, not e.g. one of the parties to the contract (if for example the vendor ships an illegal substance to a customer). The same goes for a &quot;breach of law&quot;, depending of course what you mean by breach of law. A breach of contract could not be pursued in court, given a mandatory arbitration clause. The fact that the two parties are in different countries does not nullify a mandatory arbitration clause, at least between the US and the UK.
Does this create precedent? NO This was a Crown Court case, only the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal can set precedent which it did with similar circumstances in R v Hill 1989
A summary is here: see for example Section 35 of the Judiciary Act of 1789: 'in all the courts of the United States, the parties may plead and manage their own causes personally or by the assistance of counsel'. In the same vein, Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269 held that "an accused, in the exercise of a free and intelligent choice and with the considered approval of the court, may waive trial by jury, and so, likewise, may waive his constitutional right to the assistance of counsel". In Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 it is held that this extends (via the 14th) to state courts. As to the expression "practice law", maybe the meaning of this expression is taken to be self-evident, though clearly it is not. Statutes that prohibit that act for non-lawyers generally specify things such as "for another person" or "holds himself out as entitled to practice law".
As a linguist who reads laws for a hobby, I would say that "and" legally means what it was intended to mean. There are often interpretive statutes which say that "and" can be read as "or" or vice versa, when necessary (as in ORC 1.02 "And" may be read "or," and "or" may be read "and" if the sense requires it. Delaware doesn't have that as a rule, but it is a rule employed by courts "as required". One approach to interpretation is to discern intent from surrounding text, so we would look at the whole code. The general context is the rule that "A building or land shall be used only for the following purposes". Following Article XXVII of the code, other uses could be permitted because "§115-32. Special use exceptions may be permitted by the Board of Adjustment and in accordance with the provisions of Article XXVII of this chapter and may include...". That section ends with "C:Other special use exceptions as follows", and includes "Private garages for more than four automobiles and with floor area of more than 900 square feet in a residential district". From the list of things enumerated in §115-32, there is no coherent pattern – some things are in the list of special exceptions, some things are in this list, some not. So the "surrounding text" approach doesn't help in this case. Scrutiny of legislative debate is sometimes invoked, especially at the federal level, but there is negligible chance that there is any such evidence here. The almost-final approach is to spell out the competing interpretations, and see if anything jumps out as ridiculous (because it is assumed that lawmakers do not pass ridiculous laws). The two interpretations are "both must be true", versus "one must be true". Since the general rule is that you can go ahead unless it is restricted, then with the "both" interpretation, you need a special exception permit if you simultaneously plan to have more than 4 automobiles (which means, 5+, so 4 is allowed) and floor area greater than 900 sf. Thus if you plan for only 4 cars, or can fit the 5 cars into 900 sf, then you would not require a permit (on the "both" interpretation). Which btw is the literal interpretation of "and". This is not an absurd scenario (using a generous 10'x18' space, which I derived from parking slot regulations in Danbury CT). So it is reasonable to think they meant "both". The "either of these" interpretation says that they are being even more restrictive – you need permission to have a 5+ car garage (regardless of size), and you need permission to have a garage larger than 800 sf (even if there were only 1 car in it). This seems a bit specific since there isn't generally a size restriction on structures in the code – except that playhouses are limited to 150 sf. and can't be tall enough for an adult to stand up. Since the literal meaning of "and" is "both at once", and since no facts about the code say otherwise (i.e. that interpretation does not result in an absurd nullification of some other provision), an objective court should interpret this rule to mean "both at once", thus the government imposes the fewest restrictions on your property. No way to know what they will do.
No. The Fourteenth Amendment says: nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; The Supreme Court has determined that this clause incorporates much of the Bill of Rights. The logic is mildly tortured, but it's basically that "due process of law" means "due process of a law that is compatible with the fundamental rights of a free society." This logic is known as "substantive due process," because it reads in to "due process of law" requirements about what those laws can do (as opposed to procedural due process, which is about the actual procedures being used). It's pretty settled that the Bill of Rights, after the 14th Amendment, should apply to the states. There's another possible way to get there: the 14th Amendment says "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," which Justice Thomas recently thought meant that the Second Amendment applies to the states in a concurring opinion. But as of now, substantive due process is the standard logic for it. Virtually all of the Bill of Rights is incorporated against the states. There are a couple things which aren't (like juries in lawsuits, and grand juries), but the Establisment Clause is incorporated (see Everson v. Board of Education, 330 US 1).
Are there any underlying reasons behind the nonsensical structure of U.S.C. titles? Is it simply a case of "This is how it's been for awhile, don't fix what isn't broken." or is there more to it than that? First of all, the United States Code is generally not designed to be used by non-lawyers. Second, one of the main ways to research case law interpreting a statute is by doing a boolean search on the code section of that statute. Every time you change a title or section number, you impair the ability of people doing legal research (both judges and lawyers) to find previous case law interpreting the meaning of the statute. Third, you make it much harder to determine when the substance of the provision was originally enacted (e.g. if you want legislative history or to determine which of two conflicting statutory provisions was enacted first) since an annotated statute will often show when the current section was enacted but will not explain what it was derived from. Fourth, the location of a statute within the context of other statutory sections often informs its meaning. Machine gun may have one definition in two or three laws, and a different one in two or three other laws, and there may be yet other laws where machine gun is an undefined term. Moving a statutory section from one part of the code to another could influence the default definition that one uses for an undefined term changing substantive law. Fifth, usually a new codification will also involve some drafting standards, for example, to add gender neutrality or to avoid notoriously ambiguous constructions (like 250 word sentences). But, it isn't at all uncommon for very slight changes like the position of a comma or the formatting of a section with multiple indents, to result in a change of the likely meaning of a somewhat ambiguous statute and it is pretty much impossible to know a priori when a statutory section is ambiguous until you are confronted with a fact pattern that makes the ambiguity in that context clear. This isn't confined to obscure laws of little importance. For example, the question of whether Obamacare applied in states that hadn't set up their own exchanges hinged on these kinds of issues. None of this is to say that you should never recodify the statutes. But, a basically aesthetic motivation that mostly matters to people who make up a tiny portion of the main users of the product (non-lawyers) that poses multiple threats to how statutes will be located using legal research tools, and how it will be interpreted once located, means that reorganizing statutes is not something to be done lightly. In short, there are a lot of serious, substantive costs that can accompany a recodification of a law. As a result, re-codification is most often done only as part of an overall omnibus reform of an area of law on the merits where the interest in being able to track prior interpretive caselaw and determine the original meaning of a statute enacted long ago is at its lowest. Barring the even more ridiculous case of Congress repealing everything and passing the exact same laws again, just under different Titles/Chapters/etc, This is not so ridiculous. Most states have done exactly that one or two times in their history (sometimes more for older states). Also, many newly admitted to the union states also do something similar. For example, the basic template for the statutes in Colorado was the statutes of the state of Illinois. Basically, the first time around, somebody started with an Illinois statute book, eliminated Illinois specific laws and laws that they didn't like, rearranged them and adopted them as the original statutes of the State of Colorado (it may have actually been version 2.0 after a stopgap set of statutes, I don't recall which). Also, most states completely repeal and readopt all of their statutes in codified form on the recommendation of the codifier to a legislative committee, to reflect the acts passed in the previous session, every year. This doesn't involve overhauls really, but in principle is a complete repeal and reenactment. While the federal government has never overhauled the entire U.S. Code in this manner, it has been done at the level of individual titles of the U.S. Code. For example, the most recent major reorganization and overhaul of the structure of the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26) was in 1986. The copyright laws were overhauled in the late 1970s. Both of those accompanied major substantive changes in those areas of law. Another major recodification of many parts of the U.S. Code took place following 9-11 in connection with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which reorganized both the bureaucracy and the associated U.S. Code language associated with dozens of federal agencies. would it be possible for Congress to arbitrarily merge, combine, and delete Titles, and to rearrange the location of laws, definitions, etc? Are there laws/regulations governing this? Yes. Congress can do so any time it wants by passing a bill (it would be the longest bill ever - dozens of volumes long) doing so, and getting the President to sign it. The legislative process would be exactly the same as any other bill.
Contra proferentem However, it's a principle that is rarely applied in practice since it's at the end of a long line of judicial reasoning that gets applied first. Ambiguity in contract provisions are usually resolved by the golden rule: Determine the ordinary and natural meaning of the words used Consider the context of the contract including its purpose, any &quot;recitals&quot; or &quot;background&quot; clauses and other relevant provisions If the ordinary and natural meaning is inconsistent with the context or gives rise to absurdities, modify the meaning as appropriate. In the vast majority of case, this approach will give a meaning the court adopts without needing to invoke the contra proferentem rule. However, in the minority of cases where the rule is applied it works like this. The ambiguity should be interpreted against: the party who prepared the contract (particularly for standard form contracts offered on a &quot;take it or leave it&quot; basis) the party seeking to rely on the ambiguous position (e.g. the beneficiary of a guarantee, indemnity, limitation or exclusion provision). Finally, contra proferentem may not apply because: it can be specifically excluded in the contract (which most drafters do) where the provision has been the subject of back-and-forth amendments by the parties it can be impossible to say that only one of the parties drafted it.