What are the differences between the terms &quot;act&quot;, &quot;law&quot;, and &quot;regulation&quot;? Is there any difference between "act", "law", and "regulation"? Are they interchangeable? Is "law draft" acceptable to use to refer to a "bill"? Is that legalese and common to use in legal documents?
In the US, Congress may pass an act, and this creates one kind of law (if it is promulgated: signed, ignored, or re-passed with a super-majority). Some of those acts direct the executive branch to do things, and pursuant to that act, a regulation is promulgated. Together with case law, the whole thing is "law". A bill (in the House, or the Senate) may result in an act being passed by both houses. It may go through a number of drafts between the point when it is first introduced and the time it becomes an act.
It stands for section. As in "section 8 article b" or whatever.
I found an example of "is illegal" in RCW 78.52.467: "If the department believes that any oil, gas, or product is illegal...". There are some examples of "shall be illegal", e.g. RCW 39.84.050 "It shall be illegal for a director, officer, agent", where "illegal" is used predicatively. I tenatively conclude than the latter kind of use is less frequent that the adjectival use. Black's Law Dictionary 2nd Pocket ed does not include "illegal" except in some "illegal"+noun constructions, but it does list "unlawful" alone. "Unlawful" has been used since 1387 (J. Trevisa translation of Ranulf Higden Polychronicon), whereas "illegal" only goes back to 1626. Legal language tends to be very conservative, so the fact that "unlawful" got there first (aided no doubt by the fact that it is an Anglo-Saxon construction, not a medieval Latin borrowing) gives the term priority in legal usage. It sounds more legal to say "(un)lawful" that "(il)legal".
Both civil law and common law have civil codes, so that isn't the difference. It is common in civil law jurisdictions for these to be called civil codes and consolidated into the great big book of law. In common law jurisdictions, the civil code is scattered through legislation, regulation, administrative and case law and often not consolidated although, each piece of legislation typically deals with only one (or a related number) of topics. Adversarial vs Inquisitorial In a common law jurisdiction, the role of the judge/jury is to decide the dispute that the parties have brought to the court based solely on the arguments and evidence that they make. A judge who seeks their own evidence or decides the case based on a law the parties have not argued is making a mistake. The judge is free to say to the parties "But what about xyz law?" and let them make an argument about that but they would be denying the parties natural justice if they decided the case on xyz law if that law was not argued. In civil law jurisdiction, the role of the judge/jury is to find out the truth. They have inquisitorial power and decide the case based on all the evidence, the law that was argued and their own knowledge of the law. Precedence In common law jurisdictions, the cases decided by the courts are just as much the law of the land as the acts passed by parliament. When a court hands down a decision on a certain fact pattern, then all courts lower in the hierarchy must make the same decision when presented by a similar fact pattern. These are binding precedents. In addition, decisions of same level or lower courts (where not actually the ones being appealed) as well as decisions in "parallel" jurisdictions are persuasive precedents. A parallel jurisdiction is anything where the law is close enough that it makes sense to use it: Australian courts will tend to look first to other Australian states, then to England &amp; Wales, Canada, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries then the United States of America and then to civil law jurisdictions. There is nothing nativist in this, it is just that these are the jurisdictions where the laws are "closest" to one another: partly because the courts have historically done this (which tends to lock the common law together), partly because there has been governmental will in creating harmonized laws in Australia (i.e. enacted in each state and territory but essentially the same law - often word for word) and partly because parliaments, when drafting legislation, nick ideas from other parliaments. If the Supreme Court of Western Australia has made a decision on a similar fact pattern under a similar law, a District Court judge in New South Wales had better have some damn good reasons for deciding this case differently but they wouldn't automatically be wrong if they did. However, if the precedent had been set in the Supreme Court of New South Wales than the District Court judge would be wrong to decide differently. Naturally, a lot of argument in common law courts is about why the facts of this case are sufficiently similar/distinct that the precedent should/shouldn't apply. Also, common law judgments emphasize the reasoning that led the judge from the evidence to the conclusion and include detailed analysis of the case each party presented - this is because they need to be understandable to a wide audience. Court hierarchy can be quite complex, this is the one for NSW, Australia: In a civil law jurisdiction, courts are not bound by the rules of precedence - each judgement is a first principles analysis of the facts and the law. This is not to say that civil law judges do not use other judgments in their analysis but they are not required to do so. Broadly speaking, the common law approach promotes consistency, the civil law approach promotes individualized justice.
A business must be incorporated for a legal purpose (reason), and that reason must be stated when the business is registered; but that purpose can be to be incorporated and exist as a business. It's common for businesses to be registered &quot;for the purpose of conducting lawful business.&quot;
Newspapers often say things that are not technically true by the standards of legal usage, especially in headlines which must be brief. "Legalize" is a popular or political concept, not a legal one. Instead, the legal concept underlying such court actions is that (1) an existing prohibition is unconstitutional, and thus such a law cannot exist, and (2) anything is legal unless it is specifically made illegal. "Legalize" is a reasonable term that describes what happens in such cases: to make something be legal (per (2) that means "remove a restriction").
Does "in the course of providing services" mean "during the same time as providing services" or "for the purpose of providing services" or something else? I ask because I am a programmer who will be working on my own project during the same period as I am providing services to this Client, but after-hours and not for the same purpose or business. I want to make sure that what I create for myself I will own. The best definitions that come to mind off the cuff are "related to" and "in connection with", and both of those phrases appear in the same sentence, so that is quite close to the mark. Black's Law Dictionary (5th edition 1979) (from my hard copy edition) defines "in the course of employment" as follows (citation omitted): The phase "in the course of" employment, as used in worker's compensation acts, related to time, place and circumstances under which accident occurred, and means injury happened while worker was at work in his or her employer's service. Dictionary.com defines "in the course of" as: during the course of. In the process or progress of The best definition I gleaned from relevant case law is as follows: [A]n invention made or conceived in performing, or as a result of performing, the work required by a contract is made or conceived "in the course of" that contract. That would be true even though the invention was not specifically sought in the terms of the contract. An invention is made or conceived "under" a contract when it is made or conceived during the life of the contract and the invention is, in whole or in part, specifically provided for by that contract. Fitch v. Atomic Energy Commn., 491 F.2d 1392, 1395 (Cust. &amp; Pat. App. 1974). The law which forms the background against which the contract term in question is drafted is discussed in the following language from a Federal Circuit patent law case: The general rule is that an individual owns the patent rights to the subject matter of which he is an inventor, even though he conceived it or reduced it to practice in the course of his employment. There are two exceptions to this rule: first, an employer owns an employee's invention if the employee is a party to an express contract to that effect; second, where an employee is hired to invent something or solve a particular problem, the property of the invention related to this effort may belong to the employer. Both exceptions are firmly grounded in the principles of contract law that allow parties to freely structure their transactions and obtain the benefit of any bargains reached. Banks v. Unisys Corp., 228 F.3d 1357, 1359 (Fed. Cir. 2000). A similar contact is applied in the case Greene v. Ablon, 794 F.3d 133, 142 (1st Cir. 2015), but the term was not defined or disputed in that case. This case is still useful, however, for purposes of seeing the kind of issues that are typically raised in a case like this one and to assure yourself that the contract probably is enforceable. For the purposes of this question, the difference between an employee and an independent contractor is immaterial.
I did a lot of digging through case law and statutes, but I don't see a definition for "biological sex" anywhere in federal law, though after looking through those cases, it seems pretty clear that courts think of "biological sex" as a definition of "sex," and that they take it to mean the sex listed on your birth certificate. Even if we could find a straightforward statutory definition, it probably wouldn't do much to inform the interpretation of this memorandum, as it would only apply to the specific section of law in which the definition was included.