Can the term &quot;code&quot; be used as an all-encompassing legal term for law, statutes, bills, acts, constitutions, and other &quot;legislation&quot;? I am trying to figure out what law, codes, statutes, bills, acts, constitutions, opinions, decisions, and legislation have in common, what the overarching entity is that these objects all are. I am working on an ontology and would like to put constitutions under the category of &quot;codes&quot;, along with regular &quot;codes&quot; (like the US Code), since it seems they are both dealing with law and thus can be classified the same (though they are obviously different in some ways). Likewise, after an hour of digging around, I couldn't find really what the similarities and differences were between these 9 or 10 terms really was. Can they all be bucketed under the category of &quot;codes&quot; at the end of the day, or why do they need to be kept separate? Sorry for the naive question, I am no legal person, just a software developer learning as I go. What really is a &quot;code&quot;, then? To my understanding so far, a code is a comprehensive collection of laws. So wouldn't that mean it accounts for all these other object types? Just found: Once a bill has been enacted into law, it is called an act of the legislature, or a statute. Bills are introduced in the legislature and are discussed, debated and voted upon. That helps clarify somewhat, so now it seems to come down to statute vs. constitution vs. code.
&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.
Yes Yes Yes However, these are pretty standard contract terms. Many, many terms survive the end of the substantive agreement. For example, terms with respect to ongoing confidentiality, dispute resolution, warranties, termination itself etc. The second is so common it actually has a named legal doctrine: reading down. In the absence of such a clause, if the contract inadvertently exceeds what the law allows, it preserves the contract rather than leaving both parties without contractural protection.
These clauses are called recitals. Taken together, they are a form of preamble. The tradition of preambles is quite ancient. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, has a preamble. This preamble serves to establish the authority of the one enacting the laws, however, rather than his motivation. United Nations instruments typically use a series of participial phrases as preambular paragraphs (pdf) rather than subordinate clauses, but they have the same function of establishing context and motivation. I have not been able to locate the origin of this particular form of preamble, however. It seems to have evolved gradually from freely constructed preambles. I could not identify when this form became fixed.
You've basically described two of the ends of the pole in theories of jurisprudence (there are dozens of ends). There is no theory of law that relies purely on &quot;spirit&quot; (also no theory that actually relies on the letters uses=d in writing law), instead, everybody interprets the text (the words enacted by the government) and some people supplement their interpretation with consideration of &quot;other factors&quot;, such as assumed legislative purpose. Certain scholars and judges are inclined to put most weight on the actual wording of the law, while others are inclined to let purposive considerations dictate the interpretation of a law. Interpreting law by W.N. Eskridge is an informative guide to supplementing a reading of the statute with anciliary considerations. Antonin Scalia is the best-known proponent of the textualist approach.
No, all text of the Canadian constitution is of equal force. The 1993 Supreme Court case New Brunswick Broadcasting Co. v. Nova Scotia (Speaker of the House of Assembly) makes this clear: It is a basic rule, not disputed in this case, that one part of the Constitution cannot be abrogated or diminished by another part of the Constitution: Reference re Bill 30, An Act to amend the Education Act (Ont.), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 1148. So if the privilege to expel strangers from the legislative assembly is constitutional, it cannot be abrogated by the Charter, even if the Charter otherwise applies to the body making the ruling. This raises the critical question: is the privilege of the legislative assembly to exclude strangers from its chamber a constitutional power? The opinion went on to determine that the privilege of the legislative assembly to exclude strangers was an unwritten constitutional principle which could not be abrogated by the written constitutional Charter (though they did not specifically call it an unwritten constitutional principle at the time, this is retroactively so through Reference Re Secession of Quebec para. 52). Edit: Following Toronto (City) v. Ontario (AG) 2021 SCC 34, it's not entirely clear New Brunswick Broadcasting Co. is still good law as the majority relegated unwritten principles to interpretive aids and filling structural gaps of the written Constitution, without referencing this case. The rule that the (written) Constitution cannot contradict itself seems logical though, and the cited Reference re Bill 30 does indeed state at para. 62 that the written Charter cannot override other parts of the Constitution (presumably we should read that as specifically written parts, since that's what was at issue in the reference).
What is the estimated number of lines in all current US federal laws? I realize that this metrics isn't accurate. Which font size do we use? Do we include comments? How to count someone v. United States? U.S. federal law consists of: 52 Titles of the United States Code (some of which have more than one volume) and a smattering of uncodified statutes that probably would take up one or two additional books. On the order of 100 volumes. About 2 volumes worth of federal court rules of general applicability. About 200 sets of local court rules for particular federal courts. On the order of 20 volumes for the whole set. About 2000 volumes of the Federal Reporter which sets forth published appellate court decisions. About 2150 volumes of the Federal Supplement which sets forth selected federal trial court opinions. On the order of 500 volumes of the Federal Rules Decisions which sets forth selected trial court opinions interpreting court rules. 582 volumes of the United States Reporter which sets forth U.S. Supreme Court decisions. A set of U.S. Treaties in Force on the order of 20-30 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations (50 titles, some of which have more than one volume). On the order of 200 volumes. Several hundred treaties with U.S. Indian tribes, probably about 20 volumes. About 500 volumes of territorial legislation still in force (e.g. statutes of Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, District of Columbia, Indian reservations). So, this would mean roughly 4500 volumes that have about 1000 pages of text each for a total of 4,500,000 pages, typically single spaced in 10 point (10/72nds of an inch) font on letter sized paper with half inch margins (i.e. 7.5 inches for text per page top to bottom) which works out to on the order of 50 lines per page. So, roughly, 225 million lines of code equivalent for primary federal materials only. There are some judgment calls about definitions here. For example, I did not include the full text of all works deposited with the library of Congress as part of the documentation of copyrights, or the full text of all patents and trademarks ever issued, each of which would dramatically increase the total, even though reference to those materials is necessary to determine if another work infringes a copyright or patent. Similarly, I omitted recorded real estate documents and publicly filed corporate documents even though those could each be referenced as evidence in a court case to determine someone's legal rights. And, I didn't include court orders in trial courts with no precedential effects which are binding between the parties even though some consent decrees in that set of documents have the force of law. Of course, the problem is that U.S. federal law isn't an independent body of law by itself, by design. U.S. federal law routinely incorporates the law of the state in question by reference. For example, criminal liability in federal parks is determined in part by reference to state law. A full set of state statutes and regulations in a typical U.S. state would require perhaps 50 volumes for a total of about 2500 volumes, and the entire corpus of published state level case law for all states combined is on the order of 10,000 volumes. So, excluding municipal ordinances, you are looking at another 12,500,000 pages at 50 lines a page, for about 600 million lines of code. Local government ordinances are litigated in state court so there is no separate body of case law for them. But, there are about 100,000 local governments and there are probably about 2 volumes of law for each, so about 200,000,000 pages and about 1,000 million lines of code. I'm sure I've made some minor omissions (e.g., case law from the courts of U.S. Indian Tribes), but the grand total for all U.S. law local, state and federal is on the order of 2 billion (i.e. 2,000,000,000) lines of code. Also, keep in mind that this is only the primary materials and doesn't include treatises and textbooks and digests and law review articles interpreting the law which you need in practice to utilize this corpus of primary legal materials, and which can be referenced by courts in cases. On the other hand, secondary sources are profoundly less redundant than primary sources. You could have a pretty comprehensive collection of secondary sources with 2,000 volumes which would be about 2,000,000 pages and about 100 million lines of code which could be rolled into the omitted materials in my 2 billion lines estimate. Of course, this is highly redundant. Case law spends lots of time reciting rulings from prior cases and the language of the relevant statutes and regulations, for example, and many municipal ordinances start out with an exact copy of another municipality's municipal ordinances before the municipality starts writing its own original legislation. Similarly, state traffic codes are often copied from one another. Also, not every reported case continues to be good law. But, there is no good way to separate the wheat from the chaff for a user of these legal authorities. You need them all.
One can argue both ways. On one side, yes, zero representation in the Senate for all states is equal suffrage in the Senate. On the other side, no, depriving all states of all representation in the Senate deprives them of their suffrage in the Senate (without needing to consider the question of whether the suffrage is equal). Since this question has never been considered by a court, we can't do much more than speculate how one might rule. There has never been an amendment proposed to modify the composition of the Senate -- at least not one that was seriously considered. The spirit of the law works in favor of the second interpretation. Furthermore, a strict application of abstract logical reasoning was probably not the intention of the framers. A strategy that might seem more likely to succeed would be to introduce amendments reducing the Senate's power in the legislative process, similar to the evolution of the House of Lords in the UK. If the goal were to sideline one state, this might work, but if the goal is to address the complaint that the Senate is undemocratic because people in smaller states have proportionally more influence there, there's no way the amendment would pass 3/4 of the states' legislatures. The number of states with one or two representatives is 13, by itself a sufficient number to block the adoption of an amendment.
The naming conventions for legislation in the United States and the United Kingdom have evolved over time and have undergone various changes and adaptations. It is difficult to pinpoint a specific time when the naming conventions for legislation in the two countries diverged, as the process has likely been a gradual one. In general, the United States and the United Kingdom both have a long history of using names or titles to identify and refer to legislation. In the United States, legislation is typically given a short and descriptive title, such as the &quot;Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act&quot; or the &quot;Sarbanes-Oxley Act.&quot; In the United Kingdom, legislation is often referred to by its short title, which may include the year in which it was enacted, such as the &quot;Companies Act 2006&quot; or the &quot;Bribery Act 2010.&quot; These naming conventions have evolved over time and have been influenced by a variety of factors, including changes in the political and legal systems of the two countries. It is likely that the naming conventions for legislation in the United States and the United Kingdom will continue to evolve and change in the future.