What happens when the law changes? Assume a criminal offence occurred in the past (for example 2015), before a new law was passed at a future date (for example 2016). What law would be referred to by the judge when it comes to sentencing the offender? I think there is a legal term for this in Latin but I cannot find it. My question is focusing on the United States and the United Kingdom. I have done some research, and it appears that ex de facto law is not allowed in the United Kingdom to follow directions given by the European Union. However, I am not sure if this covers my question, as it is for actions that were previously legal, whereas my question is about actions that were illegal and then had changes made to them.
united-states An ex post facto law criminalizes conduct after the fact that was legal at the time, something that is prohibited under U.S. constitutional law. But, as the question states: my question is about actions that were illegal and then had changes made to them. If something is a crime in 2015 and this criminal law is violated, and the conduct is then legalized in 2016, the conduct committed while it was a crime does not cease to be punishable as a crime and may be punished criminally. Often a judge would consider the fact that the conduct was later legalized when evaluating the seriousness of the crime at a post-legalization sentencing, but a judge is not required to do so. A significant number of pardons and commutations of criminal sentences by Presidents and Governors in the U.S. involve people convicted of crimes for conduct that is now legal or is now punished less severely. But pardons and commutations are purely discretionary. As an aside, France has constitutional protections that give newly lenient treatment of crimes retroactive effect, but the United States does not.
Is such legislation that effectively overrules a court imposed sentence even allowable? Yes. Amnesty legislation is allowed. For example, the U.S. Congress recently passed such legislation with regard to crack cocaine sentences. Legislation changing sentences for crimes is presumed to be prospective only, but this presumption can be overcome with clear statutory language to the contrary. As a political matter, however, district attorneys usually lobby strenuously against amnesty legislation, feeling that it sets a bad (political) precedent. an existing NH truth in sentencing statute would seem to conflict with the notion that any such change is possible. In the event of a direct conflict between an older statute and a newer statute that can't be resolved by any other interpretive method, the newer statute prevails over the older one, even if this result isn't expressly identified in the legislation.
Not for that reason This would not make the Act invalid. The interaction between the two laws would simply mean that criminal prosecution would only succeed for acts on or after the Act came into effect. So, even though the law purports to invoke criminal sanction for acts before it came into effect, the Constitution says it can’t so it doesn’t. That doesn’t render the law invalid, just unenforceable for that period.
The Limitations Act of 1980 and its predecessors apply to civil actions brought by private individuals. It is not a criminal statute of limitations. I will answer with regard to civil cases, rather than criminal ones. Section 40 of the Limitations Act of 1980 incorporates by reference a schedule of transition provisions that govern this question, and when a cause of action is not governed by the 1980 Act it usually defaults to the predecessor 1939 Act. The problem is both bigger than just the fraudulent breach of trust unlimited statute of limitations under Section 21 of the Act, since the deadline only runs from when an action accrues that can be long after the act giving rise to the claim actually happened, and smaller, because the act (and also its predecessor 1939 act) allow statutes of limitations to be extended for equitable reasons under certain circumstances. The 1881 Limitations Act, Section 27 had an exception to the general rule for concealed fraud tolling the statute so long as it was concealed, which probably carried over into the 1939 Act. Section 9 of the transition provisions states in the relevant part that: (1)Nothing in any provision of this Act shall— (a)enable any action to be brought which was barred by this Act or (as the case may be) by the Limitation Act 1939 before the relevant date; The 1939 Act limitations ran from when the act was committed, not when it was discovered, until the 1963 Act changes that. A full analysis of the breach of trust issue is found in this law review article.
The question seems to somewhat misunderstand the role of courts in the united-states The United States uses a common-law system, ultimately derived from the law of Great Britain as it was at the time of the US Revolution, and thus incorporating its history largely derived from the practices of English Courts. There was a period in this history where much new law was made by judges, although a great deal of it was also made by statutes, that is by Parliament. In theory such judge-made laws merely &quot;discovered&quot; what the law &quot;had always been&quot; but in practice judges made much new law. Since then the incidence of judge made law has greatly declined in the UK, and has declined even more in the US. I think that it is fair to say that Judges in the US do not now make new law with any frequency. There is, however, a major exception to this. In the US, the Federal Constitution is the &quot;supreme law of the land&quot;, and no federal or state statute, regulation or practice may stand if it does not conform to relevant requirements of the federal Constitution. (Nor may any local ordinance, regulation or practice.) But the federal constitution is written mostly in rather broad and general terms, requiring for example that &quot;due process of law&quot; be provided, but but not spelling out in detail what that means. It is therefore up to judges, and particularly to the judges of Federal appellate courts, and most particularly the US Supreme Court, to say when a law, regulation, or practice is in violation of some constitutional requirement, and what must be done to avoid such conflict. One example is the Miranda decision (Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966) holding that when admissions or confessions by criminal suspects questioned while under arrest were admitted into criminal trials, this violated the defendants' rights against compelled self-incrimination unless they had been advised of their rights under the law, including the right to remain silent and the right to legal counsel. This introduced a new substantive rule of law as a way to enforce a long-existing constitutional provision. The Wikipedia article says: Miranda was viewed by many as a radical change in American criminal law, since the Fifth Amendment was traditionally understood only to protect Americans against formal types of compulsion to confess, such as threats of contempt of court. It has had a significant impact on law enforcement in the United States, by making what became known as the Miranda warning part of routine police procedure to ensure that suspects were informed of their rights. But the concept of &quot;Miranda warnings&quot; quickly caught on across American law enforcement agencies, who came to call the practice &quot;Mirandizing&quot;. A more recent example is the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) in which the US Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment together guaranteed a right to same-sex couples to marry. This again was a new substantive rule, significantly different from the previous practice for most of US history, as a way of defining and enforcing long-existing constitutional provisions. Related to these are cases where a law, or a provision of a law, is held to be unconstitutional, and thus not a valid law at all. An unconstitutional law may not validly be enforced. Such a case was West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) which held that laws requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (flag salute) in schools were unconstitutional. These sorts of actions do not occur in those common-law countries which do not have a formal written constitution that is superior to laws passed by the legislature. That is the case in the UK, for example. Aside from that sort of case, where constitutional rights are being asserted or constitutional requirements are being enforced, the main power of US judges over the law is to interpret the law (both statute and regulation) when it is unclear or ambiguous, and to decide exactly what it will mean and how it will be applied. These interpretations can be changed or completely reversed by later legislative action, that is by new laws passed by Congress or by a State legislature. This sort of interpretation occurs in all common-law countries, and also in civil-law countries, although to a somewhat lesser degree in civil-law countries. In general, civil-law countries tend to spell out their law in more specific detail in laws passed by the legislature, leaving somewhat less room for interpretation by courts and judges. By the way, my understanding is that Indonesia is not strictly a civil-law country, but uses a mixture of systems. The Wikipedia article &quot;Law of Indonesia &quot; says: Law of Indonesia is based on a civil law system, intermixed with customary law and the Roman Dutch law. Before the Dutch colonisation in the sixteenth century, indigenous kingdoms ruled the archipelago independently with their own custom laws, known as adat. Foreign influences from India, China and Arabia have not only affected the culture, but also weighed in the customary adat laws. I cannot speak to the specifics of how the courts of Indonesia have interpreted the law on drugs in that country.
Since this apparently amends the law giving colleges and universities the power to adopt and enforced various regulations, what it really means is that if such an institution adopts a rule in violation of this law, it may not legally enforce that law. It might also give an affected student a right to sue if such a rule is adopted and enforced. As a comment by ohwilleke mentions, such a law might well authorize a court to issue an injunction forbidding the institution from enforcing the kind of rule prohibited by the law. Note that it is not at all uncommon to have &quot;or else&quot; provisions in different sections of the law. For example Section 123 of the (hypothetical) New France state code might prohibit having a faked driver's license, section 124 prohibit obtaining a license through false or misleading statements on nthe application, and section 458 say &quot;anyone who violates sections 123, 124, 125, or 126 shall be fined up to $2,000, or imprisoned for up to 1 year, or both, as a court may think just&quot;. Thus it is not always easy to find what penalties, if any, apply to a code section.
As @cpast says in their comment, these are not equivalent punishments, the fine is for the lower end of the scale where incarceration is not warranted and the maximum gaol term is for the most egregious cases. That said, your supposition is almost certainly correct; statutes tend to be a &quot;set and forget&quot; thing, legislatures have a lot to do and going back to old laws to update fines in line with inflation is probably not high on their list of priorities. In order to overcome this problem all jurisdictions in Australia have adopted the Penalty Unit; fines in statutes are stated as a certain number of penalty units and the value of a penalty unit is set in various ways that usually do not require a vote in parliament.
The law does have examples They are called “judgements” Every case decided by a court is an example, in common law jurisdictions at least. When those cases are decided by an superior court they become precedents - binding “examples” on courts in their hierarchy and persuasive “examples” on other courts. When you go to a lawyer for advice, she doesn’t just parrot back the statute, she looks at the precedents and decides whether the case decided by the House of Lords in 1848 or the High Court of Australia in 1912 more closely matches your situation. Also, statute law often has examples written into them Statues exist in hierarchies, Constitution, Acts, Regulations, Departmental Policies etc. and the lower you go the more specific the law is and the more likely it is to have examples. For example, this answer I wrote for another question quotes examples from the new-south-wales Evidence Act.