Can we identify the main source of new law in the UK? IIUC the primary sources of law in the UK are: statute (acts of Parliament) delegated legislation (statutory instruments) case law EU law But can we pick one of those as being the main source of new laws?
By volume, it's almost certainly Statutory Instruments (SIs). From the relevant page on legislation.gov.uk, we can see that the number since 2010 has ranged from 1241 to 3485 per year. Compare that to, say, Acts of Parliament (23 to 41 per year in that period). The EUR-Lex page has some numbers relating to EU law. For example, in 2018, there were a total of 430 "legislative acts", and 1496 "non-legislative acts". Note that while EU Regulations become law directly in member states, EU Directives have to be implemented by domestic legislation. In the UK, this is normally done with SIs, which contribute to the numbers in the previous paragraph.
It wouldn't be at all uncommon to cite to a new public law with a section number in the public law but not a pinpoint citation. For example: Pub. L. No. 116-315, § 2002, 134 Stat. 4932 (January 5, 2021). The citation form in the question is also acceptable: Veterans Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act of 2020, Pub. L. No. 116-315, § 2002, 134 Stat. 4932, __ (Jan. 5, 2021). This is a similar to the form commonly used in citations to newly decided court cases that haven't yet been typeset for a hard cover volume of case reports. It would be commonplace to omit a pinpoint citation from the published Statutes at Large, if the section number if provided, even in a law review journal or academic publication, in the case of a newly enacted statute. For what it is worth, the relevant Bluebook (i.e. the leading guide to citation) addresses citations to statutes at large in Rule 12.4 but doesn't specifically address what to do when pinpoint citations are unavailable, although Bluebook Rule 10.8.1 provides some options for pending and unreported court opinions. Almost all law libraries and most larger public libraries and university libraries also get hard copies of Statutes at Large on a subscription basis, although there is a considerable lag between passage and distribution of the dead tree version.
Each case is decided on its own facts I know you want a clear answer to where the bright line between illegality and legality but there simply isn’t one. The reason you feel there is a “legal grey area” is because there’s a legal gray area. The way the common law works is that there are some acts and omissions that are clearly crimes/torts/breach of contract, some that aren’t and some that live in that grey area. When someone brings a case in the grey, the court will make a ruling that will apply to similar facts and we get a little light on the subject. Then the legislature changes the law and it all goes dark again. Each of your bullet points is simply too vague and encompasses so many fact patterns that it’s impossible to say. For example, “Using a fake name/birthday”: do the ToS prohibit this? is there an intent to mislead or deceive? are there laws that prohibit this? is a benefit being received dishonesty? etc. If you come with a specific, detailed fact pattern there might be case law that is specifically relevant that will allow an answer with a high chance of being right. However, nuances matter and no two fact patterns are exactly the same and the difference might be enough to distinguish your case from the precedent. Or there might not be a relevant precedent because no one has sued/prosecuted on this fact pattern before. Then we are in virgin territory and even experts are only making educated guesses until the judge (and the appeals court(s)) hand down their decision. These are the most interesting cases to watch but the most terrifying to be part of. If you need to ask the question”where’s the legal line on this?”, there’s a decent chance you have a foot on each side.
In summary, At the time of writing, Michael Gove has overall ministerial responsibility for making planning regulations, with a good part of the role delegated to Rachel Maclean as Minister of State for Housing. The detail of regulatory verbiage is the work of civil service lawyers, based on policy formed within the department as a result of the general political process. There are various rules for how these functions arise and get transferred around government, described below. The Secretary of State can make regulations about flag display These pieces of secondary legislation, as their names suggest, are made under the authority of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Several sections of the Act empower regulations to be made by &quot;the Secretary of State&quot;, e.g. in s.220(1) we read Regulations under this Act shall make provision for restricting or regulating the display of advertisements so far as appears to the Secretary of State to be expedient in the interests of amenity or public safety. and the full Parliamentary procedure for making them is spelled out in s.333. This comports with the regulatory preambles, e.g. for the 2007 regulations, saying: The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, in exercise of the powers conferred by sections 220, 221, 223(1), 224(3) and 333(1) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, makes the following Regulations &quot;The Secretary of State&quot; means a specific Secretary chosen by the Prime Minister Note that the Act just said &quot;the Secretary of State&quot;, whereas we have just read about a specific Secretary. What's going on here is that primary legislation just wants to say &quot;whoever in Cabinet has a job that is most relevant&quot;, since functions get transferred around, departments created or abolished, etc., and nobody really wants to update a zillion Acts every time that happens. Instead, there is a framework pattern where powers will be given to &quot;the Secretary of State&quot; generally, but will be executed by a specific one according to the division of responsibilities in the government of the day. That will sometimes be just a matter of agreement within Cabinet, but at other times be encoded in secondary legislation - a &quot;Transfer of Functions Order&quot;. Those Orders are also needed to handle special situations like - transferring property and legal obligations when departments are created, merged, split or abolished making amendments to legislation which did happen to mention a specific minister ministers who are not a &quot;Secretary of State&quot; as such, but hold another ministerial title, such as &quot;Lord Privy Seal&quot; These Orders are made under the Ministers of the Crown Act 1975, and are in the form of orders of the King on the advice of the Privy Council - which is to say, that the Prime Minister decides who does which jobs. Historically, this is something of an accident, since the number of Secretaries of State has increased along with the scope of government, and it was convenient to appoint lots of people to the same formal office rather than invent fresh jobs - especially in the days before ministers were paid. In any case, flag decisions would currently be made under the authority of the minister responsible for planning affairs, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove. That comes from a 2021 order when that position was created, inheriting all functions from the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Those in turn derive from a 2018 order taking them from the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and so on back in time. SoS authority can be exercised by other people who work for him Additionally, the SoS can delegate functions to junior ministers; for example, the 2021 regulations state that they are Signed by authority of the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Christopher PincherMinister of StateMinistry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Intra-departmental delegation of functions also requires the agreement of the Prime Minister, although some functions must be performed by the Secretary of State personally. That relates to the so-called &quot;Carltona doctrine&quot;, named for a 1943 court case Carltona Ltd v Commissioners of Works [1943] 2 All ER 560, which establishes that a minister is generally responsible for his whole department, and that when some function is conferred on the Secretary of State, it usually doesn't mean that he has to do it himself. Most administrative functions are like that, although the actual laying of secondary legislation before Parliament has to be done by a member of Parliament, i.e. a member of the ministerial team. Following the downfall of Mr Pincher, the junior minister responsible for planning is currently Rachel Maclean, so she would be likely to be taking lead responsibility for putting through planning regulations. So all this doesn't mean that Mr Gove personally decides which flags fall into which category, although observers of his career know that we can't rule that out. But he is responsible for the actions of his department, and the secondary legislation would be laid before Parliament in his name and on his instructions. On the making of flags and sausages Regarding &quot;how and on what considerations&quot; these decisions are made, I have no specific knowledge for flag-related policy. But in general, the secondary legislation is written by civil service lawyers on the basis of government policy, and then approved (or at least not disapproved) by Parliament. For example, after Brexit, the EU flag was removed from the list. The mechanism would be that various people who had never heard of the Town and Country Planning Act became upset about flying of the EU flag, and either wrote to ministers or were Cabinet ministers already. Internally to the department, there would have been a mandate to stop the flag being flown, civil servants would figure out the legal steps, and draft the statutory instrument. In the end we get a regulation saying In Class H in Schedule 1, in paragraph (b) of column (1) omit the words &quot;the European Union,&quot;. even though only planning experts would know or care about &quot;Class H in Schedule 1&quot;. Similar remarks apply to the companion regulation giving prominence to the Union flag over the Scottish flag, which was a political reaction in Westminster to the SNP-led government in Scotland. Someone who is upset about a regulation, or just wants it to be different, may be able to challenge it through the political process in the same sort of way. There are also avenues for judicial review, if regulations have been made in a way which is irrational, or exceeding the scope of what the original Act allowed, or other similar reasons - but these are difficult to pursue in court. For example, it is more than three months since the 2021 regulations were made, so it is now too late to mount a judicial challenge.
&quot;Codes&quot; are usually collections of previously existing laws. The Code of Hammurabi and the Code of Justinian were both collections of laws, gathered for easy reference. In the US, the US Code (USC) is an almost comprehensive collection of current law, much of which was passed in separate statutes before it was codified. In this contest, to codify is to include a law in the code, altering formatting and numbering to make it consistent with the rest of the code. Laws in the US are normally passed and go into effect before they are codified. In modern usage &quot;code&quot; is not normally used for a single law. There is also the US Code of Federal Regulations or CFR which is a collection of regulations passed by various federal agencies to implement law. They are not laws, but in many respects thy have the force of law. I believe that several other legal systems use &quot;code&quot; or a word that might be translated as &quot;code&quot; in a similar way. In a wider sense, &quot;code&quot; can be used to refer to an entire system of law, as &quot;the Mosaic code&quot; or &quot;the Anglo-American code&quot;. It can also be used for the precepts of a non-legsal system as &quot;an ethical code&quot; or &quot;the architect's code of practice&quot;. A bill is a proposed law not yet passed by a legislature. In modern US usage, codes only include statutes passed by legislatures, not constitutions. This is because codes collect the work of legislatures, but written constitutions come from different and special sources. The term &quot;act&quot;, in modern usage, is a synonym for &quot;statute&quot;. In historic usage not all acts were statutes, only those important enough to be routinely quoted verbatim, not paraphrased.
The dichotomy between solicitors and barristers in the UK isn't one based on verbal definitions in the English language. In other words, the fact that barristers argue and solicitors don't isn't something that's inherent to the words, it's just how British law decided to divide it. Since those countries with solicitor generals don't have this dichotomy, they generally don't have anything actually called a barrister, and there's no reason why the solicitor general couldn't be called that, since solicitor doesn't require that he not argue in court.
united-states I really can't think of any influences of Scots Law on U.S. law. In all of the areas where I know Scots law to be distinctive vis-a-vis English common law, the U.S. has not followed the Scots law model, and I have never seen a Scottish precedent cited in a court opinion in the U.S. while I have seen many English ones cited (with one narrow exception noted below). For example, while the Scots Law concept of a criminal trial verdict of &quot;not proven&quot; rather than &quot;not guilty&quot; has been discussed by academics and policymakers, to the best of my knowledge, no U.S. jurisdiction has adopted a &quot;not proven&quot; verdict option. Two U.S. states experimented with non-unanimous verdicts, something that U.S. law has since disavowed, but so far as I know, this decision was not borrowed from Scottish practice. In Louisiana, it was a calculated strategy to make it easier to convict black defendants after slavery was abolished. No U.S. jurisdiction has ever had petite juries of 15 in any kind of case. Scotland and the U.S. are now aligned in being jurisdictions that have jury trials of ordinary personal injury cases, something that very few countries do, but in the U.S. case, the right to a jury trial in personal injury cases flows from English law practice that England later modified while the U.S. did not, rather than from copying Scots law. Scotland still has many common law crimes, which U.S. jurisdictions are in the final stages of completely abolishing (most have done so, but there are a few partial stragglers). Similarly, U.S. criminal law, unlike Scots Law, has never required corroboration for a criminal conviction, although, of course, it is desirable to have it if possible. The Scottish Court system has much more specialization of court jurisdiction than almost all U.S. jurisdictions do, although U.S. jurisdictions vary in the extent to which they have specialized courts, and of course, no U.S. jurisdiction has had religious courts since the early 1800s before the church was disestablished in New England. While the U.S. merged law and equity for the most part, as did most common law jurisdictions, the distinction still has a significant residual effect that differs from Scots law which never fully separated the two. Equity is still taught as a distinct elective class in many U.S. law schools to this day. Perhaps the only area I can think of where there has arguably been some borrowing from Scots Law has been in the jurisdiction and choice of law analysis applied to marriage and divorce questions. It used to be easier to get married in Scotland than in England, and in cases of parental or religious opposition, couples sometimes went to Scotland to get married and left courts to sort out whether that was legitimate after the fact. This is an area where U.S. case law sometimes referred to how those issues were resolved in the cases of disputes over whether English or Scottish laws related to marriage formation and marriage dissolution should apply. I don't know the law of mineral rights well enough to describe the provenance of some of its doctrines accurately, but there are some similarities between the Scottish concepts applicable to the structure of mineral rights, when they are reserved in a patent from the sovereign of the surface rights to property (as many key mineral rights in Scotland were starting in the early modern period), that may have some Scots Law influence. The lack of Scots Law impact on U.S. law despite significant Scottish immigration to the U.S. is to some extent a function of U.S. immigration history. Scottish immigration that was early enough to have an impact on the legal system's larger outlines was mostly &quot;Scotch-Irish&quot; (i.e. Protestants from the Scottish borderlands, often traditionally herders or subsistence farmers, who were ancestral to the current Irish Protestants of Northern Ireland), who were lower to middle class, who engaged mostly in rural subsistence farming in Appalachia and the rural American South, and were not prominent in commerce and were subordinate to an English elite (the Episcopal Church of English origins has always a higher socioeconomic status church in the U.S. than the Presbyterian Church which has Scottish roots). By the time middle class Scottish people engaged in commerce and inclined to participate in formal law and politics arrived in the U.S., a wave of migration reflected in the American West mostly from the mid-1800s as part of the gold rush and homesteading movements, the die was largely already cast with respect to major framework level issues in the U.S. legal system. The map below partially obscures this history to some extent, however, because many people with Scotch-Irish ancestry now identify for census purposes as &quot;American.&quot; Many anthropologists attribute the &quot;culture of honor&quot; of the American South and Appalachia to a Scotch-Irish ancestral source, and this culture of honor surely did influence the character of various U.S. legal doctrines and legislative developments in the U.S., but it did not involve direct borrowings from Scots Law, and indeed, it can be seen as deriving from a subculture of people for whom formal legal institutions in Scotland were sufficiently weak in practical application that they had little impact on their lives. Honestly, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that there have been more borrowings from Australian legal innovations (especially in probate and real property), and from civil law systems (for example, the law of good faith and fair dealing, and the law of unjust enrichment), than there have been from Scots law. I would be happy to be corrected if someone is aware of a counterexample, however.
Why do you expect different courts to determine different laws in the same way? The Czech and UK laws that implement the GDPR are necessary different because they are the products of different legislative and legal traditions and are written in different languages. The differences may be minor but they will exist. Particular cases will have different factual and legal nuances and be interpreted by different courts with very different judicial traditions. Czech courts set no precedents in UK courts and vice-versa. It’s no surprise that there will be different outcomes. Even jurisdictions with much closer legal traditions like US Federal Circuit Courts and Australian states often have divergent precedents on similar (or the same) legislation.